Navigating the Marital Journey

This volume presents a field-tested enrichment program, MAP, to help married couples maximize their relationship potential. MAP is a metaphor for a planned and systematic change effort for helping spouses chart and navigate toward desired individual and collective goals. A key component of the program, which is tailored to the corporate sector, is assistance to couples in forging a more productive and supportive work and family partnership that will help them achieve their marital ambitions. The program is built upon an explicit consideration of family-related values and is undergirded by a theoretically and empirically based conceptual model: the Value-Behavior Congruency Model. Although the enrichment program provides the organizing theme, the core of the book is directed toward providing theoretical and empirical support for the Congruency Model, and linking the development and implementation of the program with trends in corporate America today. Two data sets are used to test the critical assumptions that form the basis of the model. The first involves 48 married couples from two posts in the U.S. Army, where one or both spouses were members of the Army; the second involves a sample of 34 couples from a Fortune 500 corporation in the northeastern United States in which MAP was first field-tested.

Taken together, the contents of this book represent an attempt to integrate theory, research, and practice in the development and grounding of the enrichment program. Although such attempts are recognized as important tasks in the behavioral and social sciences, segregation rather than integration of these three domains has been the rule rather than the exception in the literature. This volume should be especially relevant to the growing number of marital enrichment specialists who are looking for more theoretically and empirically grounded support programs, especially those that have been field tested in the expanding market of workplace programs for employees and their families. It should be a valuable resource for senior managers and human resource professionals in both the private and public sectors who want to strengthen the organizational support for employees and their families.

GARY L. BOWEN is Associate Professor and Chair of the Families and Children's Specialization, School of Social Work, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A family relations specialist and research analyst, he is the author of numerous reports and articles, as well as co-editor of The Organizational Family: Work and Family Linkages in the U.S. Military (Praeger, 1989).