PSYC 354 DISCUSSION BOARD FORUM PROMPTS

PSYC 354

DISCUSSION BOARD FORUM PROMPTS
Discussion Board Forum 2: Religious Counseling Meta-Analysis (Module/Week 7)
Preliminary Reading: McCullough, M.E. (1999). Research on religion-accommodative
counseling: Review and meta-analysis. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 46(1), p. 92–98.
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.

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