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Marriage & Family Therapy

Current Research

The BYU MFT programs strive to be an international leader in process research that informs how change occurs and extend our healing influence beyond our programs. Explore our current research projects that our students have the opportunities to be involved with.

CAD: Couples and Disaster

This project is designed to help us learn more about the role of disaster, trauma, family of origin issues, mental health and other factors on couple wellbeing. Data has been collected from over 800 couples over a 6-month period. If you have a research question you would like to address about couple functioning and disaster, mental health, or trauma, please contact Dr. Banford Witting via email at alyssa_banfordwitting@byu.edu. Student roles in this project include data analyses, and learning to craft literature reviews by literature searching, drafting, and generally gaining skills in building publishable manuscripts. For students who are committed to a high level of involvement, co-authorship is a possibility.
Research Faculty: Alyssa Banford Witting

Pandemic and Couples: Understanding the Relational consequences of mass trauma

This project is designed to help us learn more about the role of COVID-19, trauma, family of origin issues, mental health, and other factors on couple wellbeing. Data have been collected from over 600 couples over a 6-month period. If you have a research question you would like to address about couple functioning and COVID-19, mental health, or trauma, please contact Dr. Banford Witting via email at alyssa_banfordwitting@byu.edu. Student roles in this project include data analyses, and learning to craft literature reviews by literature searching, drafting, and generally gaining skills in building publishable manuscripts. For students who are committed to a high level of involvement, co-authorship is a possibility.
Research Faculty: Alyssa Banford Witting

CHAMPS: Changing Hearts and Minds in Relationships & CHAMPS+

CHAMPS is a multi-method state-of-the-science and state-of-the-art investigation of emotional regulation and therapy processes across the first 4 sessions, including measures of daily couple functioning (self-report, heart rate, and movement/accelerometer measures), pre-/post-study self-reports, pre-/post-study couple fMRI, in-session couple and therapist physiology, in-session couple and therapist behaviors, and post-study semi-structured qualitative interviews.

CHAMPS+ is an extension of CHAMPS (described above), focusing on the experiences and preparedness of the therapist over the course of the first 4 couple therapy sessions, including a randomized assignment to mindfulness groups. Includes measures of daily self-report, pre-/post-self-report, pre-session self-report, in-session physiology, in-session behaviors, post-session perception analysis.

Students will be involved in participant recruitment, ensuring fidelity to study protocols, data collection, and data management.

Research Faculty: Lee Johnson, Angela Bradford

MFT-PRN: Marriage and Family Therapy Practice Research Network

The Marriage and Family Therapy Practice Research Network (MFT-PRN) is a collaborative network of clinicians, clinic administrators, and clinical researchers who are all interested in improving client outcomes. At the heart of the MFT-PRN is the MFT-PRN portal, an online tool used to facilitate ongoing assessment of clients at participating clinics. Students will gain valuable research experience by working with statistics, finding relevant literature, and writing papers for publications or presentations.
Research Faculty: Lee Johnson, Rick Miller, Roy Bean

Sexuality, Sex Therapy, Sexual Education Projects

Dr. Hughes engages in research with students on the topics of sexuality, sex therapy, and sexual education. He has a series of projects that students work on together, while consulting and working with him. These projects bring awareness to the field of sexuality, provide research for populations and presenting problems not common in the literature, and help to improve how clinicians can better improve sexuality for those they serve. 
Research Faculty: Anthony Hughes

WHAT? What Happens After Therapy?

Dr. Anderson is leading this project which focuses on understanding what happens when couples leave the therapy room. Research assistants will help gather objective data about partners' proximity to each other, communication and activity. The project also consists of gathering subjective reports via a daily diary. Students are involved in participant recruitment, data collection, data cleaning, and analysis.
Research Faculty: Shayne Anderson

EFFECTS Study

Dr. Anderson is leading this project which is the first randomized controlled trial of Emotionally Focused Therapy in Spanish-Speaking countries.
Research Faculty: Shayne Anderson

In-Session Predictors of Dropout in Couple Therapy

This project focuses on understanding how in-session behaviors by each partner as well as the therapist are associated with dropout in therapy. A second-year Master’s student runs this lab and is responsible for training coders, assigning tapes for review, assessing reliability of coders, and assisting with the publication of findings.
Research Faculty: Shayne Anderson

MORE: Minority-Oriented Research Evaluation Project

MORE is a meta-content analysis study evaluating social science scholarship for attention to U. S. ethnic/racial minorities. Designed to document the state of social science disciplines (MFT, Social Work, Counseling Psychology, Child Development, Clinical Psychology, etc.) for their attention to U. S. ethnic/racial minority groups. It is also designed to more fully examine the topics that are being studied among these groups and comparing these to the primary topics being studied for white, majority-culture research samples. Students can get involved in this project by enrolling in SFL 403R/PSYCH 430R during fall or winter semesters. Dr. Bean is always looking to hire “advanced coders” for the project out of those who have taken the course.

Students will gain (a) an understanding of the structure of research articles (esp. methods sections), (b) a proficiency with PsycINFO (primary database for social science research), (c) increased knowledge about qualitative (content analysis) coding methodology, (d) valuable research experience in preparation for graduate school, and (e) mentoring regarding the graduate school application process and the differences between the varying clinical professions.
Research Faculty: Roy Bean

Flourishing Families Project

Longitudinal study of the family-processes associated with youth outcomes (academic, internalized problems, externalized problems). The FFP has successfully followed 600+ pre-adolescent children into adulthood over an 11-year period with annual surveying of their individual and relational functioning. Data collection has concluded, however, there are so many studies that can be conducted using the FFP dataset. Please contact Dr. Bean for access to the codebook of variables that can be studied and analyzed.
Research Faculty: Roy Bean

Healthy and Unhealthy Intimate Relationship Practices: A Grounded Theory

Dr. Whiting is leading a large-scale qualitative project to better understand the patterns in intimate relationships that partners identify as healthy and unhealthy. This project will help scholars and practitioners focus on these essential areas, and help couples understand how to strengthen their relationships and identify and change problems. Research assistants help with interviews, transcriptions, and analysis of data.
Research Faculty: Jason Whiting