What the evidence actually supports

Divorce recovery is a field with more conviction than data. Here is what is established about the assessment we use, what is established about the program it came from, and what is not yet established at all.

We are specific about which claims rest on which evidence, because the distinctions matter to anyone deciding whether to use this with clients.

The assessment

The Fisher Divorce Adjustment Scale is a 100-item self-report measure of post-divorce adjustment, developed by Dr. Bruce Fisher as doctoral research in the 1970s and revised in 1978. It reports six subscales and an overall score.

Its reliability has been examined independently of its author. A validation of the Persian version tested 486 divorced adults, split almost evenly between men and women, and reported internal consistency of .93 for the full scale and split-half reliability of .89 — both comfortably above the conventional threshold of .70.

Subscale reliability, Persian validation (n = 486)

Subscale	Cronbach's α
Feelings of anger	.89
Symptoms of grief	.89
Disentanglement from the love relationship	.86
Rebuilding social trust	.86
Feelings of self-worth	.82
Social self-worth	.70
Total adjustment	.93

A figure of .985 for total internal consistency circulates widely in the literature. It traces back to the instrument's own documentation rather than to independent testing, so we cite the independently obtained .93 instead.

The program

The ten-week Rebuilding program developed from Fisher's work has been studied in several countries. Two studies are worth describing in full, because their designs differ in an important way.

Where RIFT sits

RIFT — Relationships, Identity, Feelings, Thinking — is our framework, developed to organise Fisher's roughly nineteen building blocks into four phases a professional can hold in mind and a client can use to locate themselves.

RIFT has not been independently validated, and we do not claim that it has been. It is a teaching and organising framework. Its value is that it makes an established method usable, not that it is itself a separately evidenced intervention.

What can be said with confidence is narrower and still useful: the phases map onto subscales of a validated instrument, so a client's position within the framework can be measured rather than estimated, and measured again to show whether anything moved.

RIFT phase	FDAS subscale	α
Thinking	Disentanglement from the love relationship	.86
Feelings	Symptoms of grief; feelings of anger	.89 / .89
Identity	Feelings of self-worth; social self-worth	.82 / .70
Relationships	Rebuilding social trust	.86

Note that Relationships rests on a single subscale, and that Identity includes the weakest of the six. We report those readings with less confidence than the others.

Does it actually work?

Every student takes the Fisher assessment before the program begins, and we ask them to take it again at the end. We matched each student's assessments against their actual class dates and kept only the ones where we could verify a genuine before-and-after pair. Fifty-six students met that standard.

The assessment places a person against everyone else going through divorce. Someone at the 40th percentile is doing better than 40 out of every 100 people in the same position.

That is the typical student. All 56 improved. Not one finished lower than they started.

Compared to waiting

We measured the same thing in people who took the assessment twice and took no program at all. Their gap between assessments was almost identical — about twelve weeks either way — so this compares the same amount of time.

One in three people who waited were doing worse twelve weeks later, not better.

Divorce adjustment does not reliably improve on its own. Which means "give it time" is not neutral advice.

What improves

Gains show up across all six areas the assessment measures, and the pattern matches what the method predicts.

Area	Before	After	RIFT phase
Grief	52nd	86th	Feelings
Confidence around others	61st	90th	Identity
Anger	49th	82nd	Feelings
Letting go of the ex	48th	81st	Thinking
Self-worth	42nd	81st	Identity
Trusting people again	43rd	72nd	Relationships

Percentile position of the typical student, before and after.

Five of the six areas finish in the top fifth. Trusting people again moves least — exactly what the method predicts, because rebuilding relationships is the final phase and ten weeks begins that work rather than finishing it.

What we can't tell you

Taking the assessment a second time is voluntary, and this covers only students whose two assessments we could match to their class dates with confidence — 56 out of the 151 students in this dataset. It is reasonable to assume that people who felt the program helped are more likely to come back and measure it.

So the honest claim is this: every student whose before-and-after we can verify improved. Not: the program works for everyone. We are tightening how assessments are recorded so future reports cover more students, and we will publish those whatever they show.

How we measure

Every claim on this page comes from the Fisher Divorce Adjustment Scale — the same validated instrument described above, administered before and after the program.

We publish the full method rather than summarising it: how the two groups were formed, how they were matched, effect sizes, every record we excluded and why, the participants whose scores fell and what we think happened, and the limits of what this kind of comparison can show. It is in the outcome report.

Three limits are worth stating here as well. Participants chose to enrol rather than being assigned, so this is a comparison of real groups rather than a randomised trial. Retaking the assessment is voluntary. And what the comparison group did between their two assessments is unknown — some will have had therapy or other support, which makes the gap we measured conservative rather than generous.

We also publish population-wide norms each month through the Divorce Recovery Index, so anyone can see what adjustment looks like across everyone entering divorce recovery, not just our students.

References

• Fisher, B. (1978). Fisher Divorce Adjustment Scale. Original instrument developed as doctoral research, 1976; revised 1978.
• Asanjarani, F., et al. (2017). Examining the reliability and validity of the Fisher Divorce Adjustment Scale: the Persian version. Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, 59(2). doi:10.1080/10502556.2017.1402653
• Altunkeser, A. (2025). Rebuilding After Divorce Group Intervention Program: an analysis of its effectiveness on divorce adjustment levels of individuals in Türkiye. Journal of Family Therapy. doi:10.1111/1467-6427.70006
• Asanjarani, F., Jazayeri, R., Fatehizade, M., Etemadi, O., & De Mol, J. (2018). The effectiveness of Fisher's rebuilding group intervention on divorce adjustment and general health of Iranian divorced women. Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, 59(2), 108–122. doi:10.1080/10502556.2017.1375334

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About Rebuilders International

Rebuilders International trains mental health professionals and divorce coaches in the Rebuilding method, developed by Dr. Bruce Fisher over more than forty years. Individuals going through divorce can find programs, classes and a free self-assessment at rebuilders.net.