Restoring Empowerment and Choosing Hope (REACH)

Not Applicable

Recruiting

• Conditions: Wait List Control; Intervention
• Interventions: Behavioral: Marriage and Relationship Enhancement Skills (MRES) Intervention

• Registration Number: NCT05299138
• Lead Sponsor: Jewish Family & Children's Service of the Suncoast, Inc.

Brief Summary

The goals of REACH are to help adults develop the skills they need to develop healthy relationship and marriage skills, improve ability to parent and co-parent effectively, identify and enhance skills and abilities required to gain or retain economic self-sufficiency, and foster family stability and increase successful marriage rates. Data from the tri-county region comprised of Sarasota, Manatee, and Charlotte counties demonstrates the presence of a number of risk factors affecting family stability, including high rates of single-parent households, births to unwed mothers, and high median rent costs compared to poverty rates and income. By providing families with relationship enhancement, parenting, and economic self-sufficiency services, this should help to optimize each family member's quality of life and improve child well-being.

Detailed Description

REACH will serve a minimum of 337 individual adults during each full year of the five-year grant term in Sarasota, Manatee, and Charlotte counties on the Gulf Coast of Florida. REACH will target individual participants and, in cases where both members of a couple are interested in participating, will deliver services to each partner individually. The primary target population for REACH is low-income, at-risk individuals.

Coupled with its successful history of providing healthy marriage programming, JFCS is well-positioned to help families in crisis become more stable and self-sufficient. Understanding the inextricable link between financial security and family stability, REACH is targeting and reaching the most vulnerable individuals based solely on economic risk factors. REACH will incorporate a comprehensive employment program combining both job and career advancement. This will help families in crisis reach improved financial stability, which will in turn improve the ability of individual participants to be better parents and better partners, furthering the goal of promoting healthy marriages and reducing local divorce rates.

Study Timeline

• Study Start: 2022-02-17
• Study First Submitted: 2022-03-03
• Study First Submitted QC: 2022-03-17
• Study First Posted: 2022-03-28
• Status Verified: 2025-02
• Last Update Submitted: 2025-02-25
• Last Update Posted: 2025-02-27
• Primary Completion: 2025-06-01
• Study Completion: 2025-06-01

Recruitment & Eligibility

• Status: RECRUITING
• Sex: All
• Target Recruitment: 900

Inclusion Criteria

• adults age 18 or older
• interested in education about strengthening their current marriage or committed relationship
• reside in Sarasota, Manatee, and Charlotte counties on the Gulf Coast of Florida

Exclusion Criteria

• under age 18
• do not reside in Sarasota, Manatee, and Charlotte counties

Study & Design

• Study Type: INTERVENTIONAL
• Study Design: PARALLEL

Arm && Interventions

Group	Intervention	Description
Marriage and Relationship Enhancement Skills (MRES) Intervention	Marriage and Relationship Enhancement Skills (MRES) Intervention	The Intervention group will be assigned a Case Manager and begin Marriage and Relationship Enhancement Skills (MRES) class weekly and meet with their Case Manager as needed.

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Family Environment Survey (FES)	22 weeks after baseline	The FES was developed to measure social and environmental characteristics of families. Face and content validity are supported by clear statements about family situations that relate to subscale domains, and the measure can differentiate between distressed and normal family samples.

Secondary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Revised Dyadic Adjustment Scale (RDAS)	22 weeks after baseline	The RDAS is a 32-item self-report standardized measure with 4 subscales (Dyadic Consensus, Dyadic Satisfaction, Affectional Expression, Dyadic Cohesion) in addition to a total score.

Trial Locations

Locations (1)

Jewish Family and Children Service; 🇺🇸 Sarasota, Florida, United States