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A comparison of didactic and modeling instruction in grief intervention skills training

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of two short-term grief education curricula, didactic (lecture) and modeling, in teaching students about grief and how to effectively interact with someone who was grieving. A control group was included in which subject read articles on euthanasia. Subjects were 84 students (67 females, 17 males) enrolled at a southeastern university who volunteered to participate in exchange for extra credit, and who met the inclusion criteria that they not be acutely grieving. This study was unique in its incorporation of an analogue interaction that allowed for coding of subject responses to a grieving confederate. Subjects completed a demographic questionnaire, a grief knowledge test, and a death anxiety scale. They were ranked on the appropriateness of responses during the analogue interaction, and their responses in the analogue interaction were coded for degree of facilitativeness to the griever. / MANOVAs were used to analyze the dependent measures by instructional format. No major findings for instruction emerged. MANOVAs were also conducted to examine subject gender and confederate gender. Significant results were obtained for subject gender in which females scored higher on a death anxiety scale than males. For confederate gender, subject who interacted with male confederates had significantly higher death anxiety scores, fewer total observation responses, fewer nonfacilitative responses, and a lower percentage of nonfacilitative responses. / Potential limitations of the study were that the lecture and modeling instructional units may have been too brief, and the subject population may have been knowledgeable in therapeutic techniques and grief information, thereby deriving few benefits from instruction. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-11, Section: B, page: 6000. / Major Professor: Charles Madsen, Jr. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_76822
ContributorsTait, Alison Norene., Florida State University
Source SetsFlorida State University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeText
Format172 p.
RightsOn campus use only.
RelationDissertation Abstracts International

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