William Doherty

Marital First Responders - The goal of this project is to develop assessment tools and evaluate the effectiveness of Marital First Responders training. The purpose of Marital First Responders is to increase the confidence and effectiveness of “natural confidants” (people whom others open up to) in supporting the relationships of people in their social network. The project comes from two sources: 1) research on confiding relationships about problems in marriages and other long-term, committed relationships, which shows that people turn first to friends, family members, and coworkers with relationship problems, long before they turn to professionals, and 2) the Australian Mental Health First Aid Program which has scaled at a national level the training of lay people to recognize and intervene supportively when someone in their life has a mental health crisis. In addition to evaluating the basic, one-day Marital First Responders training, collaborators on the project are developing and evaluating adaptions of the program for the African American and LGBT communities.

Discernment Counseling - The goal of this project is to evaluate the process and effectiveness of discernment counseling, a clinical approach to working with “mixed agenda” couples where one partner is leaning out of the relationship (considering divorce and ambivalent about couples therapy) and the other is leaning in (wants to preserve the relationship and try couples therapy). With Professor Steven Harris, I am evaluating the training of therapists to use the discernment counseling protocol along with the outcomes of discernment counseling and predictors of those outcomes.

Effects of Family Meals - I have a long standing interest in the role of family rituals in the well-being of children and adults. I have conducted national survey research on the how the frequency and quality of family dinners is associated with a range of outcomes. Several studies have been published, and there is additional data that could be mined by a graduate student interested in this area for doctoral research.