Comparing the Effects of Cognitive-Behavioral Couple Therapy and Life Skills Training on Life Quality in Uncompromised Couples Applying for Divorce

Quality of Life (QoL) is among the most significant study fields in health and wellness planning, i.e., rooted in individuals’ attitudes about health. Uncompromised couples experience decreased QoL and more life dissatisfaction. Divorce experience could lead to social and moral harms. The couples, who are unable to resolve their conflicts, require a plane to improve their socio–cognitive abilities. Such measures could lead to their performance improvement and prevent them from infidelity, divorce, and domestic violence. Therefore, the present research aimed to compare the effects of cognitive–behavioral couple therapy and life skills training on improving QoL in uncompromised divorce applicants. The obtained data could help to reach effective pre–divorce interventions and to empower couples.

This was an applied and experimental study with a pretest–posttest and a control group design. Forty–five uncompromised couples were selected based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria of the research among those referring to the Karaj family court in 2018. Accordingly, the study subjects were randomly divided into two experimental groups of cognitive–behavioral couple therapy and life skills training (n=15 couples/group) and a witness group (n=15 couples). The employed inventories consisted of demographic information form and the 26–item World Health Organization Quality of Life (WHOQOL) questionnaire (WHO, 1996). This scale was presented in 1996 by a group of WHO experts. It measures the general QoL score in 4 areas of physical health, mental health, social relationships, and environmental health. Nejat et al. (2006) investigated the reliability of this questionnaire by performing research on 1167 Tehran residents. The obtained results for the reliability of the subscales were as follows: physical health: 0.77, mental health: 0.77, social relations: 0.75, and environmental health: 0.84. Cronbachchr('39')s alpha coefficient in all areas was reached as >0.7; however, in the social relationchr('39')s domain, the same value equaled 0.55. It could be due to the low number of questions in this field or the sensitivity of the questions. The obtained data were analyzed by Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) using SPSS. The significance level was considered to be 0.05.

The present research results indicated that cognitive–behavioral couple therapy and life skills training significantly improved the QoL of the explored couples (p<0.001). The effectiveness of these interventions on increasing the QoL was estimated at 59.9%. There was no significant difference between the effectiveness of the provided intervention methods on QoL. Moreover, the obtained results of pairwise comparison of the three groups through Tukey’s posthoc test revealed that the mean difference of QoL between the control and the cognitive–behavioral couple (11.53) groups was less than the mean difference between the control and the life skills training (13.30) groups.

Based on the current research findings, couple cognitive–behavioral therapy and life skills training are effective methods to improve the QoL of divorce applicants.