Relationship Radio: Marriage, Sex, Limerence & Avoiding Divorce
Relationship Radio: Marriage, Sex, Limerence & Avoiding Divorce
Understanding Marriage Helper's 70% Success Rate
Enjoy the episode? Send us a text!
What are the most important things to look for when searching for marriage help? Is it experience? Good reviews? A high success rate? The answer is yes… to ALL of those things.
But success rate is a more nuanced metric. HOW the success rate is calculated matters just as much as the actual success rate, and that’s what we talk about on today’s episode.
In this episode, Kimberly is joined by Dr. John Hill, Director of Research at Marriage Helper. Dr. Hill and Kimberly break down Marriage Helper’s success rate over the years, the process behind the research, and the CURRENT success rate and the research being actively conducted to determine it.
You don’t want to miss this episode.
If you're struggling in your marriage, don’t wait. Get our FREE resource: The 7 Steps to Rescue Your Marriage 👉 https://marriagehelper.com/free
📞 BOOK A CALL WITH OUR TEAM: https://marriagehelper.com/call
🔗 Website: https://marriagehelper.com
📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marriagehelper
👀 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@marriagehelper
Follow our other channels!
📺 https://youtube.com/@kimberlybeamholmes
📺 https://youtube.com/@drjoebeam
The number one thing that anyone truly cares about when it comes to finding who they're going to work with in order to help them save their marriage is is this going to work for me? And that question isn't just true in getting marriage help. That question is true when it comes to several other things that we look at in life. Whether we're thinking about taking a new supplement or a new drug for something medical, we always want to know the success rate of it and, ultimately, is this going to work for me?
Speaker 1:Marriage Helper has been around for close to 30 years and we have had several different variations of ways that we have researched the efficacy of the programs that we offer, and so today we're going to dive into what that's looked like, what Marriage Helper is currently doing, and looking at our success rate and the ways that we are going to continue to try and optimize that and make it better. But also, at the end of this, you'll really have an understanding of how we at Marriage Helper think about success the groups that maybe we've had the most success with if we have some new data around that and where our historic success rate of 70% of marriages being saved came from and what it is now. So we're going to dive into this conversation, and I am joined by our Director of Research here at Marriage Helper, dr John Hill. Dr John, thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2:Thank you, it's good to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, this is a burning question on people's minds and often our workshop advisor team gets the question on the phone of where does that success rate come from? And so that's what we're going to start with today. We're going to dive into the historical success rate and the different research projects that were done, that we're looking into that success rate and then we're going to share the update. You're going to really share a lot of the updates about the last two years of the research department at Marriage Helper, what we've been working on, what findings we found and kind of where we're headed from here. So I know that everyone is excited to hear more about it.
Speaker 1:So the first research study that was ever done at Marriage Helper was a study with Dr Jim Grayson from Augusta State University, and this was done in 2005. So this study, what it did, is it looked at participants over the past seven years who had attended the Marriage Helper Workshop at that time. Now it's important to note a couple of key things here. So the very first workshop that was created, my dad, dr Joe Beam, did create that workshop. We did not call it the Marriage Helper Workshop and that very first workshop. Some of the content is still the content that we use now, but a lot of the content we have updated since then. But the way that we do this workshop, the way that we do the three-day workshop, is the same. There's some other, just the kind of the framework we use over the three days is unique to what we do and that is similar, if not exactly the same, to the framework that we used back then. So we looked at attendees who had come from 1998 to 2005.
Speaker 1:And really this research study was comprised of two questions. Dr Grayson contacted each of these people. Well, contacted each of these people Well, there was a total sample of 500, a little over 500 people that were in the list that had gone to the workshop during those five years, and 56% of those people ended up responding to his survey, which we may talk more in. When we get into this about attrition and how there's always going to be attrition, you're never going to have 100% of people unless you have them in a very controlled study to be able to get all of those people answering. But we had 56% and it was enough to power the study to the rate that he wanted it to be powered. So I'm going to pause right there, because I think this is an important part and it's going to come up in several of the things. So, john, when we talk about powering a study, what does that mean?
Speaker 2:Well, what we want. When you talk about the statistical power of a study, you want to be able to have a study that's big enough so that, if you were going to repeat it, that you'd be able to have the same success. And even then there's probabilities associated. Most researchers these days want a sample size that's big enough that there's at least an 80% chance that they'd find the same thing if they did the exact same study again. So, dr Grayson, back in 2005, when he interviewed 500 people and asked them what's your current marital status compared to where you were when you came to our workshop and would you recommend marriage helper? Yes, no, 500 people is a fantastic number To see. If that was statistically powerful, you'd find another 500 people that marriage helper had interviewed and asked them, and if the study is statistically powerful enough, you'll get about the exact same answers. You might be off by a few percent, but a couple of percent in a survey that big isn't going to matter that much, and 500, by the way, out of a few thousand is just a fine survey.
Speaker 2:People sometimes get perplexed, especially in a political season. They'll hear about 400 people were surveyed or 1,000 people were surveyed, and they go wait a minute. There's 350 million people in the country. How can these be accurate? Well, as you add more and more people to a survey, the more and more that survey begins to look like the overall population. If you're picking them, well, you're not just picking girls or guys, or rich people or poor people or whatever it is. So, yeah, we are aiming to have things that are statistically powerful enough and we love big samples. It's hard to get them because not everybody, like you said, responds. So if we send a sample out to you or a survey out to you and you qualify, we'd love for you to answer, because we need to get that sample size just as big as possible so our research can be accurate, Right, Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Now, the research that was done in looking back over that seven year time frame there was a total of I think like 550 ish people who had gone through the workshop over those previous seven years. Of that, 56% of those 550 ish, so it was about 250 or 280 people which is a fantastic response rate which is which is, I mean, that's good news. That was a fantastic response rate, Um, and initially he was wanting to look at each of the year groups by themselves as their own. As stratified, Am I using the right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, just there. You could call them cohorts or strata, but you know you have the 1998 people that came, the 1999 people, strata and cohort are just the fancy terms of the people that attended those various years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there wasn't enough people, there wasn't an equal amount enough of people that answered from each year group. So he ended up just taking all seven years and looking at them as a whole and what he found was that of the people from 1998 to 2005 who had come to the workshop, that 70% of them were still married 29% so it was about 70.3% or 70.7%, a little over 70% and then the other 29.3% were separated or divorced. So there were some years within that group that there was an 86% success rate if you just looked at that year. There was another year in that group that was like a 60% success rate if you just looked at that year, but was another year in that group that was like a 60% success rate if you just looked at that year. But when he averaged all of them it was just over a 70% success rate. For ease of math we would just call it a 70% success rate at looking at that cohort of a seven-year longitudinal part. Would you call that longitudinal?
Speaker 2:Yes, you were. You're cross-sectional.
Speaker 2:You're looking at snapshots between 1998 and 2005. So, yeah, we didn't start in 1998. And Dr Grayson didn't check them in 98, then 99, and then 2000,. All the way back to 2005. He just looked at everybody and we've done that before. Before we started this new round of research, we did email surveys out to folks going back as far as 2017, 2016, and asking them are you still married to the person you attended the workshop with, and would you recommend marriage helper? And a couple of other real simple questions. Yeah, so yeah, we've done very similar things. We've even done phone conversations with a few hundred of those people too. It works on the same principle.
Speaker 1:Yeah Now. So some people who have been around marriage helper for a while they may say hold on, though I feel like I've heard in the past that y'all used to use 77%. Now you're saying 70%. What changed? Well, here is what changed. There was a conversation that we had had in those early days I actually wasn't a part of it, I wasn't at the organization yet but there was a conversation that Dr Grayson had with our team at that point and he talked about weighted versus unweighted and he said that unweighted it was a 77% success rate, but weighted it was more like a 70% success rate. The weighted part is what we have the documentation of, and so, for integrity, once we found the documentation and knew this is what we have, we knew that we had to start using that, because that's the only data point that we could actually pull from our hands. Of the data that he did that, we could go Now, what is weighted versus unweighted, Dr John?
Speaker 2:Okay, so weighted versus unweighted. Let's go back to the last political season that we just had here as an example. So when somebody calls you or emails you or sends you a text message asking who you're going to vote for when it comes to president or senator or something like that, it's very, very, very hard to get the number of people that are Democrat in your area, that are Republican in your area, that are independent or something else in your area, and so sometimes you end up with these gaps. You might have too many people that responded who were independent, or not too many who were Democrat or something. So what are you supposed to do? You've called and called and emailed and messaged. You're not getting anything.
Speaker 2:We can look back at historical data and say, well, 45 percent of the population is in this political party, so if we adjust the 37 percent that we have to look more like the 45,. That's what the waiting does when it goes to things like looking back in time. So I would guess, with Dr Grayson's work, the people that went to the marriage helper program although it was under a different name than in 1998, 1999, and 2000,. Probably not too many of them responded, because phone numbers change, emails change, physical addresses change in seven years, eight years, and so what do you do with those people when you really wanted to have 100 of them and you only got 30?
Speaker 2:So that's when the waiting comes in and you say, ok, we're going to. We're going to say that these other people, if they're like them, would then look like this and kind of extrapolate. But then the people that you surveyed in 2005, and they had been a part of the program in 2005, well, yeah, you know who they are, you know where they live. You just talked to them a couple of months ago and you might have a really big number of them, an over-representation of them. So there's ways you can kind of lower the impact of one and kind of raise the impact of the other. That's really what kind of the weighting is like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, got it. So for 10 years we used that data to say this is what Dr Grayson found, which it is, and there's a 70% unweighted. So that's the strong success rate that we have the data and the documentation for that we move forward with so 70% success rate. So around 2015 is when the second research study came into play. Now this research study was done through Dr Beam's dissertation with the University of Sydney. So he studied now this and this study was done way differently. So we're looking at a completely different way to look at success in what Dr Beam did in his dissertation. In this one we have a control group and we have an intervention group, but this isn't a randomized control study. That would be the best. That would be the best and highest form of research that we could do. I don't know that we could ever ethically do that. Maybe we could talk about that a little bit more in a minute.
Speaker 2:That would be tough. It's like, yeah, yes, we know your marriage is in trouble, but for half of you we're not going to give you any help. Yeah, yeah, people don't want to sign up for that.
Speaker 1:No, for that success rates, that it could be harmful, that the other people are not experiencing the same type of intervention. You have to stop the study, and you see that a lot more in the medical field. So we could never do that, but we kind of did. This is kind of the next best thing the way that Dr Joe set up his research. So they recruited people who were over the age of 21. For the control group they recruited people over the age of 21 who were married and currently living with their spouse, who were American citizens. And that's pretty standard in PhD dissertation research.
Speaker 2:You have to get the variables as close to each other as you can in the first kind of study that you're doing, to something to each other, as you can in in the first kind of study that you're doing, to something it's called controlling for things, and so if you're, you know, like the U S population is like 52% female, so you'd want to have 52% female and if they certain groups falling into different income strata, certain ethnicity, hispanic origin, uh, over the age, you know, in the United States, over the age of 21, is when you're most likely to be married. So yeah, you're covering all the bases. So your sample looks as close to what the overall US population, adult population, looks like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so he, and so for his he was doing a wave one and a wave two because there was a, a pre-test, and then there was a wait time of three months and then there was a post-test. So he recruited 571 people to be in the first part of this research study and then 142 people completed the second wave. Now this is what we call attrition. There's a natural amount of attrition or people who are going to fall off and not participate in wave two of any kind of pre-test, post-test. It's a natural part of research. So he ended up for his control group having 142 people that he could actually use their pre-test and post-test and see.
Speaker 1:Basically he was using a couple of different measurements that were measuring marriage satisfaction. So the Kansas Marital Satisfaction Survey was one of them. Kmss, the DAS-4, the Dyadic Adjustment Scale, which is four questions, and both of those are measuring marital satisfaction and basically marital crisis. And so he was just trying to get an idea of in the general population who's not saying that they have any marriage crisis. Is there going to be a change at all for them over a 90-day period? And there wasn't. There was no statistically significant change. There was a decrease actually, but it wasn't enough to be statistically significant, so that was good. We have a control group that now we can compare the intervention group to that he worked with. And, dr John, you were a part of helping run the data for this research study. It was a long it was, but it was 10 years ago.
Speaker 2:Yes, I was back about. Yeah, yes, I was back about 10 years ago. Dr Joe called me up and said hey, you know, I understand you do this and it was. It was good. His dissertation is long and it's complicated, but it is elegant in that it answers the questions and doesn't you were talking about when you held it up to the strictly controlled group that Dr Joe was using. It was in the 70s as well, 70 to 75%. So all of a sudden we're detecting a pattern here. And the control group that you talked about too. We wanted to see an improvement with marriage helper scores. Hey, because you've been a part of our program and you don't expect anything to really change with the control group, because you really haven't done anything with them. And the fact that they might have decreased a little bit, but not enough to write home about, is also not surprising, because the longer you're married, the longer, the greater the chance there's a possibility that something could, you know, go wrong, go sideways, get, get complicated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean it even could be, because it was a three month timeframe. So it even could be that by that control group answering those first set of questions, they began to think about their marriage a bit more.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely yeah. Things like this can make you self-aware. You ask somebody about something, you say are you thinking about buying a Toyota Highlander? Well, no, I'm not. But then, all of a sudden, when you're driving to do the last of your Christmas shopping at Marshall's, wherever, it's like every third car is a Toyota Highlander. No, it's not, you're just more aware of them than you were before. So again.
Speaker 1:That's not surprising. Yeah, in the intervention group that Dr Joe used for his dissertation. So that group was people who were coming to the marriage helper workshop. They did their pre-test before coming to the workshop. They did the workshop and then, three months later, they had their post-test and we had 188 people who took pre-test. We had 63 people in the second wave who completed the post-test and, as you said, we had the ability to now compare those two groups to each other. And even more so, yes, we saw that there was still about the three out of four couples that were still married. But the other interesting thing so three months after the workshop, 75% of the people were still married. Another on top of that 75% nine and a half percent were separated in post or in the pre-test, and then we're now living together again in the post-test. So that is around 85% of people that had moved, had either stayed married or had actually moved in a positive direction, which was really exciting news for us to see from that study in 2015.
Speaker 1:And then, even more, what Joe? What Dr Joe was actually actually studying for his dissertation was the causes of, and correlations between, marital and sexual satisfaction, and so he was able to see that 57% of those attendees weren't just still married, but they had experienced an increase in marital satisfaction. So now they were happier and 68% of people had seen an increase in sexual satisfaction. So, and there was no sexual intervention, there was nothing in the workshop that addressed sex, but because marital satisfaction was increasing, sexual satisfaction was increasing and that was actually what he was looking for in his dissertation whether or not you could increase one by only focusing on the other. So that's what we learned from our 2015 research that we did. Is there anything that you would add to that, john?
Speaker 2:Well, I would agree that the findings even though you weren't really testing for sexual satisfaction and these other things, you and I have done some initial kind of research. Looking at our most recent, a very sophisticated form of statistical analysis called factor analysis, and it kind of says these kinds of reasons cluster over here and these kinds of group over here and these kinds of group over here, people who feel like that they're apart from each other, people who feel like they're not communicating very well with each other, surprise, surprise, their sexual satisfaction score isn't there either, because you need to be together, to be together, and so, yeah, so it's not surprising at all to me that you find these complementary improvements in marital quality of life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, let's talk about that, let's talk about our current state of research, and I think it's an appropriate place as well, before we dive into it, to just take a minute and talk about what is success, because a lot of people who help marriages and other companies out there you may see them say something like we have a 99% success rate, we have a 98% success rate, and at Marriage Helper we say we have a 70% success rate. So what does that mean? And does the word success mean the same thing in every single one of these situations? Well, we don't know these other companies, but it would be amazing if some of these other companies had success rates that high. People should be studying them in depth, because the research, the general research out there, shows that 70% has kind of been the highest that you can really get it.
Speaker 1:With some of these interventions that have been pretty well studied and so like with ours as you've been hearing us talk you, the listeners, you've been hearing us talk we try and go in-depth and make sure that we're doing this the right way. Are people still together? Is there a control group? I mean, we've done several different things. Success to us is not just did they do everything we told them to do.
Speaker 1:And there was a marriage counselor I talked to many years ago this is what I'm thinking of and she said well, I only track the success rate of people who have done everything I tell them to do, and of those people it's a 98% success rate. It's like, well, you're really picking and choosing who you're actually tracking and how you're sharing that data. And so there's several things in general when you're wanting to know about the success rate of something, the timeframe that it's looking back over, the population in which is being studied in the group, like we were saying earlier, a certain number of people is needed to power the study correctly, and there's actual calculations and different programs that we use in the world of research to tell us what we need in order to power our study correctly. What else would you say, john?
Speaker 2:Well, one of the things I would say is that it's really really hard to know what the marriage failure rate is. You know, 40 something percent. You know people that get married eventually divorce 40 something percent, yeah. But but what about for marriages that are just in trouble right now? We don't. It's really hard to, like you said, it's not ethical to create a marital problem and then have some people have it solved and then other people not solved solved and then other people not solved.
Speaker 2:And for people who are going through some kind of issue or issues and the average person, by the way, who comes to Marriage Helper doesn't just have an issue Some people, you know we'll give them 10 choices for reasons why they're attending, and nine of those are answers that we provide. And then there's another just a little open space. Other, in case their circumstances don't fit what you know, one of these other nine are space. Other, in case their circumstances don't fit what you know. One of these other nine are Some people don't put anything. Okay, that's fine.
Speaker 2:Some people a very few percent, like 2% fill up all 10. And the average, though, comes with about four different concerns problems, issues, challenges, and those are all very different. Sometimes people come with five and you don't know if that person didn't have our services, our help, and how things would pan up. Might they get better, yeah, but we just don't know what that percentage is. So it's really hard, like you said, to have something to base that on. Again, going back to Dr Grayson's percentage of the 70%, that on Again going back to Dr Grayson's percentage of the 70%. Dr Joe's of the 70 to 75%, our most recent research is showing the same thing and so what we've been doing Alina Wisniewski, our research assistant we have been reaching out to people as far back as 2022, and I guess it'll be 2023, this year, when 2025 rolls around. We're going back and we're looking at people at three months, kind of like what Dr Joe did, and we're also looking at six months and nine months and 12 months and 18 months and 24 months.
Speaker 2:We don't want to just settle with hey, we kept your marriage together for another three months. You know, please pay us. We want marriages to last a lifetime and what we're seeing is in general, if you look at all those hundreds of people that we've, that we've heard back from.
Speaker 2:We have thousands of people now in our workshop database. I'd say six thousand to seven thousand people that we have data on who've enrolled in our workshops, and we have a few hundred that have responded and hopefully, over time that number is going to increase and come back to that idea of being statistically powerful. But what we do know is this is that everybody taken together, you're looking at about a 75% success rate, and when you're looking at only those people that are married, it's 70, 75% success rate, but that's also including the people that it's only been three months Now. There are some people that come to our course and, kimberly, you've been in these workshops before and I've watched one or two of them they come because their spouse will only grant them a divorce if they attend, and some are going to be lost, and that's unfortunate. We have some that are already separated, a handful, very small handful, that are already divorced that come to the workshop. When you take all those into consideration, 70 to 75 percent. After a year, though, it drops, but again just by a little bit, maybe down to the high 60s, low 70s, but at two years there seems to be a drop a little bit closer to the 50 percent line. So marriage helpers success and we can go back six or seven years if you want to, but it seems to kind of flatten out at about 50 percent even after six or seven years. So there's still a positive effect, but 50 percent isn't where we want. We want it to be higher than that.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that the research department is doing is well, what kind of people are coming to our workshop? That? It's been a minute, and I don't mean by three months or six months, I mean two or three years, and they're still together. What separates them from other folks? And is it something to do with their age or the number of children that they have, or is it the particular kind of marital issues that they're presenting? So we want to find out what their secrets are. I think that 2025 is going to be talking to those folks. Alina and I spent a good part of the summer and a big part of the fall in focus groups talking to folks whose marriages were still intact and those that were not, talking about a variety of different issues and it's you know, it's one thing to get a piece of paper with a response on it, but to really get in and to hear people's heart and to kind of summarize what they're saying, and spend an hour with a piece of paper with a response on it, but to really get in and to hear people's heart and to kind of summarize what they're saying and spend an hour with a group of four or five of them has really been helpful. And so, looking here at my notes about this, there was another one I was going to bring up. Let's see if I can find here. It is One of the big things that Dr Grayson asked and that we ask all the time now at Marriage Helper is would you recommend our services to a friend or family whose marriage is in crisis?
Speaker 2:And the first time I saw it I thought it was just crazy, because we can't help everybody. Not everybody's marriage has the happy ending, but the overwhelming majority of us give us extremely high scores. In Dr Grayson's case, 99 percent of people said they'd recommend us. Ninety, nine percent OK, that's when 70 something percent only 70% had success. Nowadays what we do is we ask you, on a one to 10 point scale, how much would you recommend us? And 10, of course, is you know, yes, absolutely Our average right now. I just looked at the data today, you know, prepping for this 8.9. Wow, 8.9.
Speaker 2:Now, what's crazy about these numbers is that 65% of our clients who are still married or maybe they were separated or maybe, like you were talking about, they were divorced they're now reconciled, okay, 65% of those people would give us a 10. 65 would give us a perfect score. Separated half. 65 would give us a perfect score. Separated half of them would give us a perfect score. The divorcees this is where it gets interesting. The divorcees whose marriages were already broken or they came to the workshop and they didn't make it, you know, for whatever reason maybe it was, maybe maybe it was them, maybe it was their spouse, we don't know 70% of them would give us a 10. Wow, which is higher than the marrieds. Now, it's not statistically higher, but it's still higher, and you know. So this tells me that um, we're doing something right, that people are finding value, um in in what it is, that um that we're providing.
Speaker 1:Can you tell us a little bit about the focus groups, because I heard you and Alina, after doing some of them, say that there was a kind of a theme that came out of people even when their marriage had not yet been saved. They're kind of still in the middle of their marriage helper journey. What were some things that you were you heard qualitatively?
Speaker 2:The biggest one I remember was that some people would say it shouldn't be named. You know, save my marriage or whatever it is. It should be something like save yourself. When people there seemed to be this common theme and again you know if you're watching and your situation is different. We understand Everybody's situation is different, but for a lot of people they came in going, okay, this is going to fix my marriage, and one of the things that our coaches do, that our curricula does, is it says okay, that's fantastic, but let's figure out some things about you first and figure out where you are.
Speaker 2:And so my phrase you can ask Alina this for the past six months has been people come in to Marriage Helper, often with their hair on fire. You know that this is a point of crisis. Maybe they found us. A lot of people find us on a Google search or a YouTube search. The overwhelming majority find us on some kind of media. They're not recommended by a therapist or a counselor or a pastor or a minister or not even a friend. They find us online. They're desperate. They find us, they come in and maybe in a very short period of time, they go into one of our workshops and they say, yes, this is going to fix things, this is going to fix things. And what they end up finding out is is that it's actually kind of helping them understand and fix themselves.
Speaker 2:And a lot of folks that come through our program have been through counseling and have been through therapy and there's nothing wrong with going through counseling or therapy. But a lot of our focus group people said, yeah, they helped me figure out what went wrong. They helped me figure out what it is in my background and my spouse's background that made us incompatible or was giving us this kind of trouble. But now they're looking for that move to the future that push to the next thing. So the therapist and the counselor not all of them, but many of them talk about OK, here's what brought you to this point. Not all of them, but many of them talk about OK, here's what brought you to this point.
Speaker 2:Marriage helpers, coaches are saying, according to our people in the focus groups OK, we know, we know now why things have happened. Let's plan a course for you to be a better you, regardless of whether the marriage works out. Now we want the marriage to work out. We're going to do everything we can to make the marriage work out, works out. Now we want the marriage to work out. We're going to do everything we can to make the marriage work out. But if it doesn't, you can still come out of this and still be a better person to yourself and to the rest of your family and to your friends, and just in your future going forward. Those are probably been the two or three biggest things that we've discovered.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that follows exactly what we've been rolling out at Maritalper with the seven steps to save your marriage and the first three you can do and should do by yourself, because they focus more on you and fixing yourself maybe a hard way to put it, but really looking inside and becoming aware of the areas in which you have the opportunity to grow and you have the opportunity to change and become your best self.
Speaker 1:The first three steps to saving your marriage has nothing to do with your spouse, and it is the hardest thing to try and get people who have their hair on fire, like you said, to see, because all you can see when you're in the middle of the crisis is but my spouse. But if they, I need them to come back. How is focusing on me going to help them come back? They need to change, they need an intervention of some kind. I need them to listen to this material, not me, but it's actually opposite of what people logically think it might be. When you work on you, it gives the best opportunity and the highest likelihood that your spouse actually will come back around to be able and be willing to get marriage help with you, which is the thing that is going to give you the best chance at being able to save your marriage fully.
Speaker 2:And the spouses that maybe we're all worried about because the marriage is in crisis and I'm coming to marriage helper and they don't want to do anything with it, or maybe they're really reluctant or they found some other love. When those first three things are implemented, what we're hearing from the focus groups, what we're seeing is spouses are noticing and spouses are going. You're taking this seriously and spouses are going. You're taking this seriously. But it's not an overt part of marriage helper to say I'm taking this seriously and it's all because of marriage helper. No, no, it's just I'm trying a new course of action here and it's making a difference, and sometimes that's an invitation for that wayward spouse, the reluctant spouse, to come, and then for others it is actually yeah, you're taking this really seriously. I don't want to have anything to do with this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So it's important to know. Just like going back and summarizing some of the things we've said, it's important to understand when looking at success rates, understanding success rates what is the success rate? The first question to ask is well, the success of what? So if someone's saying that something is this much successful, what is the thing that they are using to measure that? And at Marriage Helper, ours is are you still married? That's our key one. Now there are several other ones that we are tracking as well. I don't know that we have enough data yet in our groups of people, but things like self-esteem, hope, some different things that are kind of a part of an assessment that we've created.
Speaker 2:All those things it depends on. Are you coming by yourself? Are you coming with your spouse 2025? I know that for researchers, a lot of it's going to be dealing with those solo spouses where the other spouse is just not interested. Little pile of my brain things.
Speaker 2:You were talking about other ways to measure success. Maybe you go through the program and maybe you're still together, but things are still kind of tense, okay. Okay, one of the things we've noticed is that, on average, these are people who were separated, divorced or just married and are still married, and again, this is the freshest numbers that we have. Marital satisfaction levels increase significantly Okay, not doubling or tripling, but they're enough to be statistically significant. People are happier with their marriages. Levels of anger drop by 20%. So if we're ticked off at our spouse or they are or both of us are how would a 20% decrease in that kind of frustration feel to you and to your relationship? Here's another one Trust increases.
Speaker 2:A lot of people almost two thirds of the people that come to Marriage Helper tick one of those 10 reasons. They say that one or both of us is having some kind of an affair. Are there trust issues there? You, betcha? How would you like to see an improvement in trust. These kinds of things are the building blocks to strong marriages and stronger marriages, and so there's definitely value there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So it's the success of what over what period of time, with what group of people and how many of them. These are key things and so for us, as John was just saying, we are doing a rolling two year time frame that we're assessing people, looking at things not just are you still married, but how are you moving in these other areas. So that's the group of people that we're working with, the clients that we have served, and we're splitting it between people who are coming as couples, people who are coming as solo In those we are looking at two different things and in what their journey entails and how much data makes something significant. Well, part of the thing at Merit Helper for us is, like John said, we have 6,000 to 7,000 historical workshop data for clients. But, as with probably so many research studies, the thing is getting people to continue to be engaged with the research and so, probably to our detriment, in the past it was all done through our regular email marketing system, which people you know, once they get their marriage saved, they're likely to, unfortunately, unsubscribe from Marriage Helper, because it can be a reminder of things that they've you know, the hard times of their life that they've been through, or people may just get fed up with the fact that we do send a lot of emails and so they could unsubscribe. But we've moved all of that over to a different system to where it's only research going through that system. So it's going to take time as we continue to build out this data but we do, to just get more numbers and feel more, just have more robust findings for all of these things that we are, that we want to understand about our clients and the ways that we want to better their journey. But John, dr John and Alina have done a fantastic job at really just caring so much about our clients that we are combining the quantitative data and the qualitative data through our surveys and through our focus groups and taking all of that, combining it, understanding where our clients are and what we can continue to do better. This is a key part of what we do and how much we care about marriage here at Marriage Helper, and so I'm encouraged.
Speaker 1:John shared some of these numbers with me a couple of weeks ago and I could have run down to Birmingham just like the 250 miles just run down there and given him a huge hug because it was great information to hear of the good news we were hearing, but the other thing, john, that I wanted to point out as you said, we don't have a lot of data yet, but in that second year, we're really beginning to see that success rate dropping, and so what I want clients to hear is you may feel like you're out of the woods and then you stop doing the things that need to happen. We are re-gearing our efforts going into 2025 around. What does that second year look like for our clients? Because now we have the data to show this is a breaking point, and so what are we going to do to help the client continue to have to maintain that 70% to 75% success rate even into year two? But I think you need to go into it with the mindset of that too.
Speaker 1:This isn't a quick turnaround. Yes, it's a three-day weekend and maybe in you know a 90-day program that I'm going through, but it's not going to be fixed in 90 days. This is a lifetime, sustained change that needs to happen and you can't become complacent in it. I mean, there was a question we had as the research team, which is how long does Marriage Helper take ownership of the success rate? Like, at what point is it really that we did everything we could for the client but now it's on them to maintain, to maintain those efforts and I don't know that we ever got to, you know, got to a decision on that. But we want to help maintain the success rate, as long as the client is actively engaging and and we're proactively moving them forward. However long that might be, John, what would you have to add to that?
Speaker 2:I would say it's a two-edged sword, because, on the one end, we want people to be able to go we are whole, we are better and at the same time, though, we don't want to be like that person who goes I feel OK, today, I don't need to take my pills.
Speaker 2:If this is a situation where you need to take your pills, then you need to take your pills. Maybe. Maybe things are different after two years, but one of the things we talked about in the focus groups that we were, that we were talking about was we were finding some people that had been part of our program for a few years and they were kind of, you know, weaning themselves off to go, and you know, to the next step of other things, and so I think that there's a point where that happens. We just don't want to string you along forever for subscription fees or something like that. That's not the point. The point is for you to have a good marriage and good, you know, interpersonal and family relationships. That's definitely going to be part of our future. Work is trying to figure out, like you said, that break point.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so, john. With all the research that we've talked about today, the research you've been running over the past several years of data points at Marriage Helper, what are some of your key takeaways? Even if it's recapping some things we've already said, what are some of the key takeaways that you have from the research?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. That's a good question right there. Well, the first thing is, I really think and it's not just because I work here, but I really do think that Marriage Hel helper is making a difference. People associate you and Dr ahead and put their resources into marriage helper is because they believe, they believe in our success rate. They, they, they think that it, that it can make a difference and it is making a difference. Is it going to save everybody's marriage? No, it's not, but it can make us better, okay, and when we're better, that you know everybody, everybody is going to win.
Speaker 2:I did, before I started doing this work, from 1995 to 2015, I did public policy research and a lot of it dealt with social and economic interactions. We looked at marriage rates. We looked at divorce rates and birth rates and in all sorts of different ways where we would define changes in culture. We looked at that off and on every few years for 20 years and the world of marriage is different than it was in 1998 or 2005 or 2015,. The rate of marriages is down by 20, 25 percent since when Dr Grayson did his first work in 2005.
Speaker 2:The amount of cohabitation is up, the number of divorces is down, but that's also because fewer people are getting married, and so the world is different than it was 26 years ago. People have different attitudes about marriage, and so it world is different than it was 26 years ago. People have different attitudes about marriage, and so it's important to us to refresh our data, because we live in a different time. People still think marriage is important, but not as many people are committing to it. 200,000 fewer couples are getting married every year than they were 20 years ago, so there's a lot of work that needs to be done and a lot of facts that might need to be refreshed.
Speaker 1:I know at times it can feel like we're fighting an uphill battle with even just cultural changes. I mean, that's part of the question that's come up as we've been talking about our research and what we're seeing with our clients is if society as a whole has a different commitment level about marriage, then man, like our success rate is going to be even harder to maintain over time with people. But we are trying our hardest and our darndest, that's for sure, Just like forward thinking into what the future of marriage helper looks like. But our sliver is continuing to fight for marriages to stay married and have good and healthy marriages and last a lifetime.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely we can't help everybody, but we can help that one, or we can help that two, or we can help that 500, and that 500 can move the needle away from chaos toward more order. Just given time.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and it makes such a difference. Strong families, committed marriages, make a difference on the individual level, on the marital level, on the family level and on the societal level. It's I mean, there's been so much research about that over the years that you can't really argue against it. So it is important and the hard work that people are doing to fight for their marriages is not in vain. And even if it feels like no change is happening right now, the fact that you are becoming a better person is helping, is helping you to be a better mom or a better dad.
Speaker 1:It can still have a family change for you, even if your marriage were to never be saved. But the ultimate goal, of course, is that your marriage would be saved, and we see it so many times where people had given up or everyone in their life told them not to, and they ended up saving their marriage, not because of Marriage Helper. We just guided them along the process and they did the hard work and their spouse ended up doing hard work and they made it work. They reconciled and have beautiful families today. That's why we do what we do.
Speaker 2:We're making a difference and success may look different for every client because people are different, but one thing that we can offer all of our clients is hope for something better.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. Thank you so much for joining me, Dr John. I appreciate everything you've done.
Speaker 2:You're welcome. It's good to be here.
.png)
.png)
