Conversations
Five things couples are expected to have settled, and whether you two have actually talked about them.
- Questions
- 25
- 9 min
- An agenda, not a compatibility test
What this is
This deliberately produces no compatibility score, and there is a reason beyond taste. Similarity between two people predicts attraction when they first meet and stops predicting once a relationship exists; a percentage built by subtracting one questionnaire from another measures something the literature says does not predict what you care about; and averaging two people into one number destroys the only information a two-person instrument has. What is left is worth more anyway: whether a conversation has happened is a fact about an event, not a guess about a mind. Even the modest claim behind that — that premarital conversation helps — should be held lightly: the two largest randomised trials of relationship education, Building Strong Families and Supporting Healthy Marriage, found effects on relationship quality that were null to trivial and none on whether couples stayed together.
Where it comes from
written down, not impliedAn agenda, not a compatibility test
The topic areas are the ones every premarital inventory covers, and the approach follows Stanley, Rhoades and Markman's research on deciding rather than sliding into commitments. Nothing is taken from PREPARE/ENRICH, FOCCUS, RELATE or SYMBIS.
Written for this app
- Reliability
- not measured
- Factor structure
- not measured
- Validity
- not measured
Further reading
- Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Markman, H. J. (2006). Sliding Versus Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect (opens in a new tab). Family Relations, 55(4), 499–509original source
- Wood, R. G., Moore, Q., Clarkwest, A., & Killewald, A. (2014). The Long-Term Effects of Building Strong Families: A Program for Unmarried Parents (opens in a new tab). Journal of Marriage and Family, 76(2), 446–463critique
- Lundquist, E., Hsueh, J., Lowenstein, A., Faucetta, K., Gubits, D., Michalopoulos, C., & Knox, V. (2014). A Family-Strengthening Program for Low-Income Families: Final Impacts from the Supporting Healthy Marriage Evaluation (opens in a new tab). Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (MDRC)critique
Read the result as a structured version of what you said, not as a measurement of you.
Why these questions carry no evidence
Every questionnaire in this app writes its own items, because the framework behind an instrument is usually public while the published questionnaire is copyrighted. That is the honest way to build it and it has a cost worth stating plainly: reliability and validity belong to a specific set of questions given to a specific group of people, not to the name of the idea behind them. These questions have never been given to a sample, have no norms, and have no evidence that they measure what they are named after.