The effect of participation in group counseling sessions of transactional analysis on the marital burnout, adjustment and intimacy

Marital burnout and dissatisfaction and reduced intimacy is a serious threat to the survival of the marital relationship. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of group counseling based on transactional analysis on marital burnout and intimacy. The research method is semi-experimental with pretest-posttest design with control group. The statistical population consisted of all couples in district 2 of Tehran city in 2016 selected using the simple random sampling. A total of 40 people (20 couples) were selected and randomly divided into experimental and control groups. The subjects responded to Pines Marital Burnout Questionnaire (MBQ) (1996), Spanier Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS) (1976) and Walker and Thompson's Marital Intimacy Scale (1983). Group counseling was weekly conducted with Stewart and Jones’ transactional analysis approach (2011) within 10 sessions of 60 minutes in one of the counseling centers of Tehran. Data were analyzed using multivariate covariance analysis using SPSS-22 software. Results show that there is a difference between the experimental and control groups in the scores of marital intimacy (P