Skills for Healthy Adult Relationships (SHARe@UMBC): Interest, Risk Factors, and Dissemination
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Date
2019-01-01
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Department
Psychology
Program
Psychology
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Distribution Rights granted to UMBC by the author.
Access limited to the UMBC community. Item may possibly be obtained via Interlibrary Loan thorugh a local library, pending author/copyright holder's permission.
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Access limited to the UMBC community. Item may possibly be obtained via Interlibrary Loan thorugh a local library, pending author/copyright holder's permission.
This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.
Abstract
Skills for Healthy Adult Relationships (SHARe@UMBC) is a relationship education program designed to prevent intimate partner violence (IPV) and enhance relationship functioning among college students (Khalifian, Murphy, Barry, & Herman, 2016). Preliminary research suggests people who participate in SHARe@UMBC improve in relationship skills and report no IPV perpetration or victimization following their participation. Similar to other relationship education programs (Dion et al., 2010; Wood, et al., 2010), participation in SHARe@UMBC was low even after significant recruitment efforts (Khalifian et al., 2016). The present research includes two studies to address the following objectives: 1) identify predictors of expressed interest in SHARe@UMBC, 2) identify barriers to participation, and 3) determine whether delivering SHARe@UMBC in an alternative format (e.g., web-based or course for credit) may increase interest. Participants were college students recruited through a psychology research participant pool. For Objective 1, I hypothesized the following characteristics would predict expressed interest in SHARe@UMBC: female and White/Caucasian. For Objective 2, I hypothesized students uninterested in SHARe@UMBC would identify the following barriers: time commitment required, no romantic relationship/relationship problems, and concerns about safety/self-disclosure. Additionally, I hypothesized students would identify the following circumstances in which they would consider participating: if they had more time, if there was an incentive, and if they were in a relationship or had relationship problems. Due to limited research and foreseeable pros/cons of alternative delivery formats, there were no hypotheses for Objective 3. Hypothesis 1 was not supported. No demographic variables were associated with expressed interest in SHARe@UMBC. However, being assaulted and being injured by an intimate partner during one's lifetime were weakly positively associated with expressed interest. Consistent with hypotheses for Objective 2, the most common reasons participants were uninterested in participating in SHARe@UMBC were time commitment and perceptions the program is irrelevant/unnecessary. Similarly, students indicated that they would be interested in participating if they perceived it as relevant to them, if they had more time, and if there was an incentive. For Objective 3, there was preliminary evidence that SHARe@UMBC delivered as a web-based program garnered more interest than the traditional group format. Implications for research and prevention are discussed.