The Relationship Conflict Inventory (RCI) was developed to evaluate couples relationship conflict efficiently and inexpensively for use by clinicians as an assessment tool for initial evaluation, treatment outcome, and - if desired - tracking progress. It focuses on the verbal and physical processes of conflict in terms of frequency, distress level, and causal attribution.

Specific Applications

1. To help therapists and patients target the areas of greatest conflict.
2. To help patients and their therapists clarify the nature and severity of relationship conflict.
3. To accumulate normative data on both verbal and physical conflict.
4. To have a roughly hierarchical scale potentially useful in clinical and research applications.
5. To have a scale for assessing the processes of conflict.
6. To have a scale for assessing the frequency level of various kinds of conflict.
7. To have a scale for assessing the distress level of various kinds of conflict.
8. To have a scale for assessing the attribution of cause for various kinds of conflict.
9. To make possible the inclusion of relationship conflict as a diagnostic category in the DSM or other systems for diagnosis or classification.
10. To provide a concise yet broad and sensitive inventory for measuring changes in relationship conflict.