The Relationship Education Workshop and Its Impact on Learned Healthy Relationship Outcomes and Self-Compassion in the Emerging Adulthood Population

The present study examined the effectiveness of the Relationship Education workshop (Davila, 2020) on several outcome measures for its target population, emerging adults. The Relationship Education workshop is comprised of two consecutive three hour sessions which take place a week apart. Participants were recruited from a southeastern state university campus. Participants were given a thorough and group-discussion based didactic focusing on the relationship competency skills of insight, mutuality, and emotion regulation with other core focuses, including relational decision making and adaptive relationship beliefs. Participants who completed the Relationship Education workshop were hypothesized to show improvement in these target domains as compared to their waitlist condition peers. Self-compassion is also a lesser targeted skill interwoven throughout the workshop, and relates highly to several of the core skills taught. A mediation model was proposed for the association of workshop participation and self-compassion mediated by learned relationship knowledge from the Relationship Education workshop. 61 participants (n=30 workshop, n=31 control) completed baseline, post-workshop completion, and one-month follow-up measures for all variables of interest. Repeated measures analyses of variance were used to test outcomes related to the relationship competency skills as well as relational decision making and adaptive relationship beliefs. A mediation model utilizing the bootstrapping sampling method was proposed for the association of workshop participation with self-compassion as mediated by learned relationship knowledge. Results indicated that workshop participants had better long term outcomes in mutuality, emotion-regulation, relational decision making, and adaptive relationship beliefs as compared to those in the waitlist condition. The mediation model proposed was significant, indicating that learned relationship knowledge functioned as a mediator on the association between workshop participation and self-compassion. Those that were in the workshop condition displayed higher self-compassion scores at the final post-test, and these scores were mediated by the learned relationship knowledge (learning targets of the workshop). Findings from the present study contribute to the early outcome data for this relationship workshop and provide evidence of effectiveness for a different population from those initially tested.