Past research has shown how personality characteristics and demographics influence the likelihood of couples and individuals participating in marital interventions. However, these studies do not focus on the factors that influence men’s participation and are limited to their respective sample frames, making them difficult to generalize to a population. A nationally representative, population-level study of newlywed males may help to provide more generalizable insights regarding the factors that influence men’s participation in marital interventions. The current study had two purposes. First, this study sought to examine the personality and demographic factors that influenced the likelihood of men participating in a variety of marital interventions. Second, this study attempted to provide a demographic description of men who participated in marital interventions. A sample of 2,150 men were drawn from a nationally representative random probability sample known as the CREATE survey. Binary and multinomial logistic regression analyses were used to address the research questions. A total of three factors were found to be influential in the likelihood of men participating in marital interventions – religiosity, depressive symptoms, race/ethnicity. This study provides an in-depth view as to how men’s religiosity largely influenced the likelihood of them participating in marital interventions, nationwide. Such conclusions have valuable potential to help practitioners understand, in detail, how men’s religiosity may influence men to participate in marital interventions.

Although self-directed marriage and relationship education (MRE) has the potential to reach a larger or different audience than traditional MRE, little has been done to examine the characteristics of those who access self-directed materials. This study examined individual, couple, family, and sociocultural context variables that predicted participation in both self-directed and traditional MRE programs. A series of logistic regressions were conducted using SPSS 19.0. Different factors predicted participation for each intervention. For self-directed programs, those who were older, more educated, more religious, less materialistic, whose partners were more neurotic, who had been dating for a shorter amount of time, and who had poorer relationships with their mothers were more likely to participate, while a wider range of factors predicted participation in traditional programs. Family life educators should consider creating self-directed materials designed to reach a wider audience.