Transactional Analysis and Solution-Focused Brief Therapy on Marital Satisfaction: Implications for Christian Couples’ Counselling

Marital satisfaction may be the sole key to a couple’s happiness. Thus, this study explores the application of Transactional Analysis and Solution-Focused Brief Therapy in relation to the improvement of marital satisfaction in Christian couples. The study adopted the non-randomised control group pretest-post-test quasi-experimental. The sample size of 400 was purposively drawn from a population of 34,518 for the study. Based on the analysis of the 400 inventories, 15 ‘dissatisfied couples’ (making a total of 30 respondents) were selected and placed into control and experimental groups. The research instrument used was the Marital Satisfaction Inventory (MSI) with a Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient (r) of .89. The finding showed a significant difference in marital satisfaction of couples before and after intervention with regard to transactional analysis theory and solution-focused brief therapy on all the scales of the MSI. Respondents reported improved marital satisfaction, a change from being dissatisfied before intervention and becoming satisfied after intervention. Based on the findings of this study, it can be concluded that counselling theories such as transactional analysis and solution-focused brief therapy are effective in improving the marital satisfaction levels of couples. To this, it was recommended that marriage counselling practitioners should learn more about the two theories and apply them in helping their clients out of their relationship challenges