THE PERSONALIZED SPOUSE OBSERVATION CHECKLIST: A COMPUTER‐GENERATED ASSESSMENT OF MARITAL INTERACTION

The Spouse Observation Checklist (SOC) (Patterson, 1976) has become an integral part of behavioral marital treatment approaches in recent years. Jacobson and Margolin (1979) have called the SOC one of the most valuable tools available to the behavioral marital therapist, and Christensen and Nies (1980) claim that the SOC has been.crucial to the development of behavioral marital therapy. The checklist contains approximately 400 behaviors spanning 12 areas of marital interaction that have been categorized a priori as "pleasing" or "displeasing." Spouses are typically instructed to monitor these events by going through the entire inventory each evening and checking the behaviors their partner performed during the preceeding 24 hours. Some modified versions of the SOC have recently been developed (Weiss & Perry, 1983). At present, however, no studies have been published which examine psychometric properties of these modified versions. Gunman, Knudson and Kniskern (1978) have criticized the SOC for its organization of events into pleasing and displeasing categories, arguing that certain events on the checklist may be pleasing for some individuals and displeasing for others. They feel that the SOC communicates to couples that certain events "should" be pleasing or displeasing, or worse yet, that events listed as pleasing are "good," and events listed as displeasing are "bad." They state that many of the events listed as displeasing may actually be healthy for a marriage, and conclude that the SOC may subtly encourage repression of conflict, Another criticism of the SOC is that it is too long and tiresome to complete every night, A fluent reader familiar with the SOC can complete it in less than fifteen minutes. However, it may take a slower reader an hour to complete it, thus becoming an aversive Cask (Jacobson & Margolin, 1979). Finally, in order to complete the checklist, a spouse must read through all 400 items, many of which are not relevant to him or her, e.g., the item, "we played with our pets" only applies to those who have pets. In light of the above criticisms, a revised form of the SOC has been developed, using computer word-processing functions,' An assessment form was devised that lists all items from the original SOC in random order, and asks spouses to categorize each event as "pleasing," or "displeasing," "neither pleasing nor displeasing," or "not relevant." All items marked as "neither pleasing nor displeasing" or "not relevant" are deleted from the original pool of items. The computer then prints out a personalized form of the SOC for each partner. The search and replace function (common to most word processing packages) also allows spouses' actual names to be entered into the items,