Assessing Mechanisms of Action in Family Intervention: The Roles of Empathic Communication and Perceived Understanding

Marital conflict is linked with a wide range of adjustment problems in both children and adults, negatively impacting marital longevity, children’s emotional security, and future romantic and peer relationships. Even among otherwise low-conflict families, changing needs, roles, and expectations that arise when children reach adolescence often result in more frequent and intense parent-child conflicts and declining feelings of family closeness. This makes the quality of communication between parents and between parents and their children a paramount issue. The degree to which marital and parent-child conflicts are communicated and resolved in a constructive versus destructive manner greatly influences long-term relational satisfaction and healthy child development. Preventive intervention programs and RCT trials designed to increase constructive conflict behavior have shown promise in improving family outcomes. Research has yet to disaggregate the range of processes accounting for these beneficial effects, however, so the psychological mechanisms through which positive changes operate are unclear. A critical need exists to identify these mechanisms of change through multi-method, process-oriented analyses. One important potential mechanism is relational empathy, which refers to the reciprocal communicative process of reaching better mutual understanding and validation of conflict issues, interests, and needs. Because of relational empathy’s capacity to meet basic needs and contribute to emotion regulation, it may be a particularly efficacious conflict behavior. However, empathy is most often studied in nonrelational contexts, and little is known about its distinct role for helping to resolve family conflicts or contribute to long-term family adjustment. To address these gaps, quantitative and qualitative analyses that included multiple timescales and domains of measurement were used to assess whether two aspects of relational empathy during conflict—cognitively empathic communication and perceived understanding—helped to explain positive short-term and long-term outcomes in the Family Communication Project (FCP). The FCP was a 4-week RCT-based preventive intervention focused on family conflict, communication, and adolescent adjustment. Participants were a community sample of adolescents and their two primary caregivers (N = 225 families). Each family was randomly assigned to one of two treatment groups (parent-adolescent or parent-only) or two control groups (self-study or no treatment). Assessments were conducted to 3-years post-intervention and included observational coding of interparental conflict discussions, daily dairies about family conflict in the home, self-report questionnaires, and qualitative interviews. The study was guided by three major aims: (1) to evaluate the role of empathic communication during interparental conflict discussion interactions; (2) to evaluate the role of perceived understanding during day-to-day conflict across family relationships; and (3) to contextualize the quantitative analyses by conducting a thematic analysis of the 3-year qualitative interviews. Among parents, treatment was associated with statistically significant increases in empathic communication and better trajectories of mutual perceived understanding during conflict for up to a year after the intervention. Although interparental empathic communication did not predict immediate reciprocal partner behavior during conflict discussions, it did predict resolution and positive affect change. Perceived understanding during day-to-day conflicts predicted increased resolution across all family dyads, and it longitudinally mediated positive treatment effects on marital adjustment for both parents. The parent-adolescent treatment condition was also associated with statistically significant gains in mutual parent-child perceived understanding and attachment to both parents. Qualitative themes among high-empathic-change participants corroborated many of the quantitative findings but also revealed complexity in the range of perceived program effects on long-term knowledge and behavioral skills. The results provide support for the conclusion that relational empathy is an important preventive intervention mechanism for promoting positive relational change in families.