Following a brief review of literature on marital and family treatment for alcohol problems, this paper describes two types of marital therapy frequently used with alcoholics and presents a brief overview of results from a study in progress comparing the two modalities. Behavioral marital therapy uses communication skills training, contracting, and weekly homework assignments to help couples change specific behaviors in the clinic and at home. Interactional communications-oriented therapy provides feedback on current negative interaction patterns and suggests changes in couple behavior but does not use extensive behavioral rehearsal or specific homework assignments. Couples (N=36), in which the husband had recently begun individual outpatient alcoholism counseling, were randomly assigned to a no-marital-treatment control group or to 10 weekly sessions of either a behavioral or an interactional couples group. Behaviorally treated couples improved more than the other couples on all the marital adjustment measures analyzed and more than the interactional (but not more than control) couples on drinking. In the year after treatment the behavioral group was still superior to the controls on marital adjustment but not to the interactional group and did not do appreciably better than the other two conditions on drinking adjustment. (WAS)