ABSTRACT
A great deal of clinically oriented research on marriage has been based on the dream that the correlates of marital dissatisfaction would suggest which processes should be changed by therapists. Thus, the dream was that the correlates of marital dissatisfaction would be a source of therapeutic goals. The extent to which this idea has actually been put into practice is another question, one that need not concern us here. I will call these empirically derived therapeutic goals the “agenda” for marital therapy. It is not necessarily the job of such research to address the issue of how to best create the suggested change.
