Discussion Board Forum : Religious Counseling Meta-Analysis

Preliminary Reading: McCullough, M.E. (1999). Research on religion-accommodative counseling: Review and meta-analysis. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 46(1), p. 92-98. Full text available through the Jerry Falwell Library. Log in to access the article for free.

Thread Prompt: As you have been studying this module/week, a meta-analysis is a study that statistically combines the results of several studies on a similar topic.

By calculating an overall mean effect size, meta-analyses help provide information on the effects of treatments over and above the individual studies themselves.

McCullough's meta-analysis examines several studies that compare Christian counseling techniques to standard, non-religious counseling techniques.

Imagine you are working in a community clinic with a variety of counselors, and you are interested in alerting the clinic supervisors to this meta-analysis and possibilities for future research that could be conducted in your clinic.

Write a professional email to your supervisor and include the following required information:

1. Briefly describe how many studies are represented in this meta-analysis and what the main findings of the meta-analysis were.

2. In your opinion, why is this meta-analysis important in the context of Christian counseling, even though the results are not significant? Support your answer with information from the article.

3. Propose a study: In the meta-analysis discussion section, the subsection entitled "The Last Word" contains 4-5 suggestions for further studies in Christian counseling. Choose 1 that interests you and briefly propose a quantitative study to investigate this topic. The description of your proposed study must include:

a) Your research question;

b) A short description of the target participants (gender, age, diagnosis or problem area, etc.);

c) The independent and dependent variables, and how many levels/groups the independent variable would have (review Module/Week 1 if necessary);

4. The type of outcome measure to serve as your dependent variable, as well as its level of measurement (nominal, ordinal, scale?-see Module/Week 1). The measure could be a questionnaire, self-report, therapist rating of illness severity, number of diagnostic criteria met, etc. This can be something you come up with yourself. You do not have to name an actual existing instrument unless you know of one.

5. Include references in current APA style for any sources, including the meta-analysis.

1. Important Considerations:

1. Because you are taking on a role and writing letters, this discussion board prompt leaves no room for comments such as the following, which will result in loss of points:

a) "Great job on your discussion post,"

b) "I totally agree with everything you said,"

c) "Good luck in the rest of the class," etc.

2. The word count may not include text from this prompt or direct quotes from classmates' posts. If you include this type of material, make sure that you have enough words to reach the minimum word count without it.

WORD COUNT: 300