Restoring Empowerment and Choosing Hope (REACH)

Official title

Restoring Empowerment and Choosing Hope (REACH) in Sarasota Florida

Overview

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.

Interventions

• Behavioral Marriage and Relationship Enhancement Skills (MRES) Intervention
  The Intervention group will be assigned a Case Manager and placed in the next available Marriage and Relationship Enhancement Skills (MRES) class that is convenient for their schedule. Intervention participants will attend classes weekly and meet with their Case Manager weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, as needed. Study measures will be gathered from intervention participants at baseline, 10 weeks after baseline, and then 22 weeks after baseline. The following tools will be utilized at baseline and

Primary outcome measures

• Family Environment Survey (FES) [Time frame: 22 weeks after baseline]

Secondary outcome measures (1)

• Revised Dyadic Adjustment Scale (RDAS) [Time frame: 22 weeks after baseline]

Eligibility criteria

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

Criteria are shown verbatim from the registry (in English). Final eligibility is always assessed by the study center.

Healthy volunteers: Yes

Study design

Allocation

Randomized

Model

Parallel assignment

Masking

Single blind

Primary purpose

Treatment

Study locations

United States · 1 center

• Jewish Family and Children Service — Sarasota

Identifiers

NCT: NCT05299138 · 20220208

Primary sources (government registries)

• ClinicalTrials.gov (US NIH)

View this study on ClinicalTrials.gov ↗