This follow-up study investigated the effect of a systems-oriented graduate
training program upon system thinking among practitioners who had completed training,
using a post-test only, treatment-comparison group design. The subjects consisted of
practitioners matriculated through two counselor-related programs at a medium-sized
college in the Northwest during the years 1985-1991. A family systems-oriented
training program for clinical child and youth work (CCYW) counselors and a nonsystems-
oriented training program for school and agency counselors (SAC), respectively,
were the sources for treatment (n=40) and comparison (n=30) groups.
The theoretical orientations of the two programs were the principal independent
variable, and years of post-training experience, conjugal experience, and age (life experience)
were the additional independent variables used for the study. The principal dependent
variable was systemic thinking and the secondary dependent variable was executive
skill (therapeutic intervention skills). Data was collected from the administration
of the Family Therapy Assessment Exercise (FTAE), developed by Breunlin and Associates
(1989). The FTAE consists of a 30-minute videotaped simulated family therapy
session, followed by administration of a series of multiple-choice questions concerned
with subject judgments of therapeutic steps portrayed in the simulation. The FTAE has
been found to have high discriminative validity across studies for the measurement of
systemic thinking among subjects with different levels of training in family systems therapy.
The primary research hypothesis was that means scores for the treatment group
would be higher for systemic thinking than for the comparison group. Descriptive and
inferential statistics were derived from the data and multiple regression analysis was
conducted. The statistical hypothesis of no difference was set at the .05 level of significance.
From findings, the null hypothesis was rejected at the .01 level of significance
and the research hypothesis was accepted. From correlational tests between systems
thinking and the three secondary independent variables, and between Executive Skills
and the two independent variables of years of experience and conjugal experience, differences
for the null hypotheses were not found to be significant at .05 and were not rejected.
These results indicated that relative to the variables considered for the study,
systems-oriented training had an important effect upon the ability to predict systems
thinking abilities. The implications of the findings and recommendations for future research
were discussed. / Graduation date: 1995
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/35079 |
| Date | 14 September 1994 |
| Creators | Peterson, Raymond W. |
| Contributors | Vuchinich, Sam |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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