Knowledge of marriage and family concepts and perceived competence of marriage educators conducting marriage preparation in two Protestant denominations in British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Marriage is perhaps the most popular voluntary institution in Canadian society. Fifty-six percent of British Columbians choose to be married in a Christian church. Most of these couples will find that they are required to participate in a marriage preparation program. Little is known about these marriage preparation opportunites, or about the individuals who provide these opportunites. Recent studies (Bader, Riddle & Sinclair, 1981; Ridley, Avery, Harrell, Leslie & Dent, 1982) have begun to demonstrate the effectiveness of the field of marriage preparation, but no studies examine the qualifications of educators. This study had two objectives: 1) to measure the knowledge of marriage and family concepts of marriage educators providing marriage preparation and 2) to re-test Wright's (1976) finding that clergy do not perceive themselves to be competent providers of marriage preparation. A random sample of 25% of Anglican Church in Canada and United Church of Canada congregations in British Columbia (n=117) resulted in 62 marriage educators responding to this study. This represents a response rate of 57.7%. The respondents were asked to complete a self-administered questionnaire which allowed for the collection of demographic information about the congregations and respondents as well as the measurement of the dependent variable perceived competence, six independent variables and four control variables. As no instruments to measure knowledge of marriage and family concepts were available, a measure was developed for this study and is known as the Knowledge of Marriage and Family Concepts Instrument (KMFC). Respondents were found to have moderate scores on KMFC and perceived themselves to be reasonably competent providers of marriage preparation. No significant results were found for the relationships between either of the dependent variables and the independent variables. Post hoc analysis determined significant relationships between knowledge of marriage and family concepts and gender, and between perceived competence and total number of hours spent in marriage preparation. This study implies that clergy need increased training in content areas relevant to marriage preparation. Further research studies are suggested.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".