Feasibility Study of Couple Therapy Treatment for Situational Couple Violence

Inclusion Criteria:

- This study is open to married, dating, and cohabiting couples.

- Couples will have to be involved in an intimate relationship with their current
partner for at least one year.

- Both partners have to be older than 18 years of age at the time they sign consent.

- Couples must have mild to moderate forms of situational couple violence.

- Both partners must want couples therapy and both partners must desire to maintain the
relationship.

- Both individuals from the couple must participate concurrently, although they will
sometimes be separated when asked questions of a sensitive nature.

- Only heterosexual couples will be included in the study.

- Both partners can be on psychotropic medication, if they are on medication and stable
for past 12 month prior to enrollment, and no psychiatric hospitalization for past 2
years.

Exclusion Criteria:

- Couples will be excluded from the study if there are indicators of severe intimate
partner violence and/or characterological violence as this study targets couples with
mild to moderate levels of violence. In order to distinguish between these two
different types of violence, we will use specific items in the Conflict Tactic Scale
(CTS) completed by both parties (Johnson, & Leone, 2005). Severe and/or
characterological violence in this study is defined as follows:

- If participants answer yes to both of the following items: "I punched or hit my
partner with something that could hurt", "I kicked my partner".

- If participants answer yes to any of the following items: "I choked my partner,"
"I slammed my partner against a wall," "I beat up my partner" "I burned or
scalded my partner on purpose," and "I used a knife or gun on my partner".

- One of the partners reports that a violent behavior was repeated at least six
times in a year by their partner or themselves.

- Participants will also be excluded from the study if they answer yes to the following
questions: "Do you have any firearms at home?", "In your previous relationships, did
your partners ever tell you that you were physically abusive?"

- Participants will be excluded from the study if they are not stable on psychiatric
medication for more than 12 months.

- Couples will be excluded from the study if there is a discrepancy between partners'
reports of violence (received or perpetrated) in the CTS, defined as the difference
between the partners' reports of the frequency of a particular act by the same
partner. If the difference of the average score of the partners, or for any of the
acts in the scale in the CTS is greater than 2, the couple will be excluded from the
study. For example, if the female partner reports that the male partner pushed her
three times but the male partner reports that he never pushed his partner, the couple
will be excluded from the study since the couple will receive a difference score of
three for the act of pushing.

- Participants will be excluded from the study if undiagnosed, untreated serious mental
illness is suspected during pre-screening. In order to screen participants with severe
mental health problems, Symptom Checklist (SCL90) will be used. We will use the cut
off 0.885 with the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve with
lower and upper bounds of the 95% confidence interval.

- Participants will be excluded from the study if there are indicators of substance
misuse. We will use the 16 item Simple Screening Instrument for Substance Abuse
(SSISA) to screen participants' substance use. We'll score only 14 items out of the 16
items, which were selected by the Treatment Improvement Protocols (TIP) 11 consensus
panelists from existing alcohol and drug abuse screening tools. A score of 4 or
greater has become the established cutoff point.

- Participants will be excluded if they reported any history of violent legal offences
in the past 2 years.

- Participants will be excluded if participants are currently suicidal and/or psychotic
and/or patients who is moderately ill (e.g. equivalent of Clinical Global Impression
(CGI) score 3 or greater) at the pre-screening.

- Participants who are not literate or cannot speak English will be excluded. The
questionnaires require a 6th grade reading level.