The Universal Dimensions of Change: A Systematic Review of Couple Techniques

One can find a rich set of empirically evaluated techniques across different schools in couple therapy over its evolution of five decades. Though there are multiple systematic reviews and analyses of couple intervention studies, none focus on reviewing the universal dimensions of change across therapeutic techniques. Understanding the common areas of change would enable integrated learning across therapy modalities for novice therapists. Therefore, the aim is to identify the techniques employed in couple intervention research and categorize their change dimensions. We examined 40 articles on couple interventions published across 16 journals and identified 111 techniques. The five therapeutic change dimensions, namely behavior, cognition, emotion, attachment, and holistic, were categorized based on the common factor integration of techniques. The identified techniques were further classified under the five dimensions using the voting procedure to validate the universality of change dimensions.