The Development of a Hope-Focused Self-Help Manual for Couples

Bibliotherapy has gained more popularity as a self-help approach in the last few decades. In an era where individuals have come to expect quick treatment results, self-help resources have assisted therapists and individuals in supplementing existing treatments or in other instances, being the only resource that some individuals turn to. Due to the rapid rise of bibliotherapy's popularity, some empirical research has been done to evaluate the effectiveness of such approaches in a multitude of settings and to treat a wide variety of topics. However, one particular area in which research has been limited and inconclusive is the area of using bibliotherapy with couples. As a result, there is a large need for conducting empirical research on the effects of using self-help as a treatment modality within the context of couple therapy. The goal of this study was to assess whether the newly developed Hope Couples Self-Help Manual would be effective in improving couples' satisfaction with the hope to test the efficacy of the treatment protocol, while investigating whether couple satisfaction is increased upon treatment termination in a repeated case study method.