Marriage Encounter: A Critical Appraisal

This paper describes and evaluates the Marriage Encounter movement from theoretical and clinical perspectives. While acknowledging that Marriage Encounter responds to a need among many couples for greater marital closeness, the authors raise concerns about potentially destructive and illusory effects of the Marriage Encounter experience. The paper calls for more dialogue between professionals and leaders of the Marriage Encounter movement as well as for empirical evaluations of the program's effects .     

Design of a strategic planning management information system

Information systems that are to support strategic planning must be developed on bases that reflect the unique nature of strategic organizational decisions. This paper presents a systems design methodology which implements five basic criteria for the design of a strategic planning Management Information System (MIS). The methodology uses discriminant analyses of the perceived importance to managers of various categories of strategic information to delineate the most significant information requirements of various managerial groups. These results are augmented with similar analyses based on the personal characteristics of the potential system users in order to implement a design criterion related to the integrated nature of a planning MIS and a ‘teaching’ objective which is posited to be valid and feasible for such a system.