Determining the Effectiveness of Reality therapy on Intimacy, Compatibility, and Assertiveness of Married Women

Decreased intimacy, compatibility, and assertiveness are common problems between couples and have negative effects on their marital life. One of the treatment methods recently introduced to overcome this problem is reality therapy. The present study aimed to determine the effectiveness of reality therapy on intimacy, compatibility, and assertiveness of married women.

This study employed a quasi-experimental design with a pre-test, post-test, and follow-up with the control group. The research population included all married women whose marriage duration was under 5 years aged below 40 years living in Tabriz in 2018.A sample of 30 married women were selected using availability and randomly placed into two control and experimental groups, each with 15 members. Both groups completed the Dyadic Compatibility Scale (DAS), Bagarozzi Marital Intimacy Needs Questionnaire (MINQ), and Assertion Inventory (Gambrill & Richey, 1975) as the pre-test. Then the experimental group received the treatment in the form of reality therapy for 12 hours over 8 weeks. Then, the same tests were administrated to both groups as the post-test. The data collected through the pre-test and post-test were analyzed by repeated measures analysis of variance.

The results showed that reality therapy was effective on intimacy, compatibility, and assertiveness of the experimental group compared to the control group in the post-test stages (p=0.001).

According to the results of this study, it can be concluded that reality therapy training can reduce couples' marital problems by increasing intimacy, compatibility, and assertiveness.