ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the specific challenges and needs of low-income couples, creates ideas of how to address these problems, and overcomes these challenges. Low-income couples face a variety of challenges: environmental, psychological, and emotional. Their environmental stressors can be unreliable transportation, no childcare, varying work schedules, and limited financial resources. Having multiple low-paying jobs with irregular schedules can make finding family time and/or attending a Relationship and Marriage Education (RME) class very difficult. Many low-income couples are not married and have uncertain futures together as a couple. They also have different emotional stressors than middle-class couples. Some people have summarized their efforts and found several initial potential best practices to recruiting low-income couples. In recruitment, there are two basic types: active and passive. Active recruitment encompasses speaking directly with the potential participants in face-to-face interaction. On the other hand, passive recruitment is nondirective and engages participants through the Internet, mailings, advertisements, and fliers.
