Auburn’s College of Human Sciences recently received a grant of $10 million that will go to studying the Alabama Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Initiative, according to Francesca Adler-Baeder, professor of human development and family studies.
“The grant comes through us, and then we employ a lot of people and pay graduate research assistants and then we have 10 families research centers in other parts of the state,” Adler-Baeder said.
Adler-Baeder said that student involvement is important to this initiative.
“There will continue to be a lot of student involvement,” Adler-Baeder said. “Undergrads can sign up for credit hours to work either service learning or undergraduate research.”
Some of the students' tasks would be doing service learning training in delivering educational classes and facilitating classes and undergraduates' research and evaluating surveys to generate reports, according to Adler-Baeder.
She also said graduate students serve as research assistants and are paid by the grant to do a little bit of everything, including teaching classes, gathering research and running analysis reports.
The Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Initiative has been an ongoing project for the past five years, according to Adler-Baeder.
“It’s about enhancing relationships for a broad spectrum of population, and that includes young people who are not married and people who are married,” Adler-Baeder said.
The Alabama Marriage website includes several resources.
“There’s relationship videos on there, relationship reality TV and a PDF of the marriage handbook,” Adler-Baeder said.
Even though couples receive a marriage handbook when they get a marriage license, anyone can get it from the website now, according to Adler-Baeder.
“The most important program is that we actually offer relationship education classes in many high schools throughout the state," Adler-Baeder said.
Adler-Baeder said these take place multiple times a year in Auburn.
“Periodically, we offer a couples conference people in Auburn can come to, students included,” Adler-Baeder said. “We offer that service several times throughout the year so people just need to look for the advertisements.”
Adler-Baeder also discussed the content of these conferences and the other topic the program tackles.
“The curriculum is called ‘relationship smart,’ and it’s about good decision making, how do you even decide to get into a relationship, what things should you be looking for and then there’s more practical skills training,” Adler-Baeder said. “Trying to help communication and conflict management.”
This program is relevant to Alabama because of the state's high divorce rate.
“All across the country, of course, people do face challenges in relationships,” Adler-Baeder said. “Historically, here in Alabama, unfortunately we’ve had one of the highest divorce rates in the nation for decades.”
Adler-Baeder said that’s why this program initially began.
“So, it was the reason originally were began doing this … to see if we could offer some educational resources and information that could be helpful to advance people's knowledge about healthy relationships,” Adler-Baeder said.
The economic issues that have plagued certain areas in Alabama have been contributing factors to divorce rates, according to Adler-Baeder.
“It’s especially important in Alabama, where people may face more challenges than in another areas,” Adler-Baeder said. “Compared to other states, a lot of families in our state face economic stress.”
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