THRIVE has a rich theoretical foundation. The 7 Sectors of a Collaborative Marriage — a healthy-marriage model — are drawn from:
Systems Theory
Pragmatic Communication Theory
Attachment Theory
Recent findings from Neuroscience
The 7 Sectors of a Collaborative Marriage are:
Specific questions — "nodes" on the THRIVE Sphere-Chart — have also been generated from a review of research on marriage and extensive educational-clinical experience.
Unlike most instruments, THRIVE is not based on "objective" scales that have been quantitatively developed and tested for validity and reliability with samples from different populations. THRIVE is not an analytic-predictive tool.
Rather, THRIVE is qualitative in nature. It captures partners' subjective perceptions of their relationship experience, as nodes on a Sphere-Chart. The tool gives a couple a systematic structure — a relationship map — for viewing, discovering, talking about, and better understanding their relationship. Partners' nodal responses and the configuration-patterns they create wait for the couple’s own explanation and interpretation. A couple is not being measured by — or compared to — other couples. Their experience is simply theirs.
From this standpoint, each couple's Sphere-Charts are unique in relation to those of other couples, and in relation to each time they take the inventory. THRIVE is sensitive to each partner’s present experience and subject to change over time. This attunement to change and its richness of information arrayed around the Sphere make THRIVE both useful and powerful.
This, of course, does not mean important research cannot be done using THRIVE. On the contrary, research is being conducted both on the instrument itself, and as a tool for capturing life and change within marriages.
William Bailey, Ph.D., at the University of Arkansas and Daniel Wackman, Ph.D., (co-developer of COUPLE COMMUNICATION) at the University of Minnesota are serving as research coordinators and consultants for THRIVE.
THRIVE is a new tool for ongoing research into marriage. All THRIVE Sphere-Charts are studied anonymously with complete confidentially when used for research or professional education.