The social learning approach to marital and family therapy emphasizes the importance of clients' compliance with homework assignments to treatment progress. To investigate the relationship between clients' homework compliance and therapists' and clients' behaviors during therapy sessions and clients' intrasession tension and satisfaction, the marital and family therapy sessions of 24 nuclear families were audiotaped for a 10 week-period. Tapes were analyzed for therapist behaviors (clarification, interpretation, relationship emphasis, education, encouragement of affective expression, control, encouragement of specificity and clarity, and style) and client behaviors (emergency and welfare emotions, task orientation, blame, mutuality, clarity and specificity, and tone of communication). Therapists kept records of homework completion and carried out midweek telephone interviews to assess family tension and satisfaction. An analysis of the results showed that several therapist and client session behaviors correlated with homework completion in the beginning phase of treatment. Homework completion was positively correlated with therapist educational behaviors and negatively correlated with clients' expressions of anger, stress, and blame. Although marital tension negatively correlated with homework completion in the beginning phase, in the middle phase homework completion and marital tension were postively correlated, suggesting that a certain amount of tension is needed to maintain motivation. (BL)