| The purpose of this phenomenological study was to collect therapists' perceptions of the impact of the practice of marriage and family therapy upon the therapist's marriage. Audiotaped interviews were conducted using open unstructured questions. Responses from 24 Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists were obtained by snowball and convenience sampling. Background characteristics such as sex, education level, years of experience, percent of time spent in various forms of practice, times married and whether spouse was also a therapist served as independent variables; occurrence of themes, and therapist's scores on the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (Spanier, 1976) served as dependent variables.; Results showed that a total of seven recurring themes were found in the responses of the participants to the interview questions. Three other areas arose in the interviews, but did not occur often enough in the sample to be considered as a theme of the group. The results suggest that those therapists who stated themes 5 and 7 were higher on three DAS subscales. The results also suggest that therapists who hold master's degrees and have fewer years of experience tend to score lower on the DAS subscales Consensus, Satisfaction, and Affectional Expression, than those who held doctoral degrees and have vast experience. Conclusions, limitations, implications, and recommendations for further research are discussed. |
