PREVENTING DEPRESSION IN COUPLES FACING JOB LOSS

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This proposed collaborative research project (R-10) is the next step in a coordinated program of research on the prevention of emotional and behavioral disorders in individuals and families experiencing job loss. Pursued by investigators at the Michigan Prevention Research Center of the University of Michigan (NIMH Grant No. 5P50MH38330) and the center for Family Research at the George Washington University, the proposed R-10 project brings together unique scientific resources from each research team that, when combined, will produce a preventive intervention for couples experiencing the crisis of job loss that could not be achieved by either team alone. The Michigan group brings more than ten years of experience in conducting large scale randomized longitudinal preventive trials testing the successful J0BS preventive intervention in two separate replications. The most recent replication includes data from spouses and significant others. They also bring substantial expertise in the training, development and delivery of job search interventions, and, more recently, on coping with economic hardship. The George Washington team brings ten years of experience in the study of how families deal with crises, including new empirically based theoretical models of couples' interaction and mental health, and data from their current longitudinal study of social support in couples coping with the crisis of job loss. in addition, they bring new behavioral measures of couple interaction derived from micro-analytic studies of videotaped recordings of couples' interaction coping with the crisis of job loss. The proposed collaborative study will involve the development of a new preventive intervention for couples experiencing job loss aimed at the prevention of depression and the disruption of intimate relationships that will: 1) involve both partners of the couple in the intervention; 2) focus on the mental health of both partners as mental health targets; 3) elaborate a theory of couples coping with job loss, attending to both individual level and couples level processes; 4) draw on the emerging findings from the two sites in designing the new couples-oriented preventive intervention; and 5) provide an opportunity for replication to test generalizability of the preventive interventions, by conducting parallel controlled intervention trials at both sites. As an outgrowth of the collaborative development of the couples intervention, replicated randomized trials at each site will be conducted that will involve screening, pre-test, and intervention with 300 experimental couples and 150 controlled couples with post-tests immediately after intervention at six months and at one year. The proposed R-10 collaboration will also make it possible to test the generalizabiiity of preventive intervention theory and findings across two sites and across two major sectors of the economy, the manufacturing sector which continues its steady decline and the service economy which continues a pattern of substantial growth.