This thesis presents information on community healthy marriage initiatives and university-community collaborations. Specifically, it examined the workings of one of those healthy marriage initiatives in the university-community collaborative context. The project explored the current process of this initiative, identifying specific challenge points and defining factors and characteristics associated with the success thereof. Rather than working in discrete categories, these challenge points exist on a success continuum. How each challenge is managed determines whether it is a success factor or a stumbling block. The project is grounded in published learning from other university-community initiatives and employs an ethnographic qualitative research strategy. Data consist of interviews with several key collaborators (n = 9) who were involved with this initiative. The findings from this ethnography support and enhance previous literature on university-community collaborations and outreach scholarship and provide useful examples and lessons that can be used by other university-community collaborations, especially those involving marriage education initiatives in a community setting.

abstract: Universities and community organizations (e.g., nonprofit organizations, schools, government, and local residents) often form partnerships to address critical social issues, such as improving service delivery, enhancing education and educational access, reducing poverty, improving sustainability, sharing of resources, research, and program evaluation. The efficacy and success of such collaborations depends on the quality of the partnerships. This dissertation examined university-community partnership (UCP) relationships employing stakeholder theory to assess partnership attributes and identification. Four case studies that consisted of diverse UCPs, oriented toward research partnerships that were located at Arizona State University, were investigated for this study. Individual interviews were conducted with university agents and community partners to examine partnership history, partnership relationships, and partnership attributes. The results revealed several aspects of stakeholder relationships that drive partnership success. First, university and community partners are partnering for the greater social good, above all other reasons. Second, although each entity is partnering for the same reasons, partnership quality is different. University partners found their community counterparts more important than their community partners found them to be. Third, several themes such as credibility, institutional support, partner goodwill, quality interpersonal relationships have emerged and add descriptive elements to the stakeholder attributes. This study identifies aspects of UCPs that will be contextualized with literature on the subject and offer significant contributions to research on UCPs and their relational dynamics. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Community Resources and Development 2015