Talk:Lifespring/Archive 1

message: I have started a cleanup of this article, and it now reads much more NPOV. It is also on my watchlist, and I will revert any vandalism that I see. Jeffpw 16:32, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Cleanup

message: wow, it's pretty interesting to go back in the history of this page and look at the stuff that's been removed.  Here someone took out some critical links  and someone removed a scholarly reference .  It also appears that some valid categories were removed in that first round.  I'm going to go ahead and return new age and personal dev, i think this group may qualify but I don't know that much about it so please share your thoughts!  please feel free to let me know on my talk page! I'm not really sure about all those critical links.  I don't really feel like going through them(at least right now) but at least one or two should probably be in the article to balance things out.  I think we should also add link descriptions. TitaniumDreads 23:44, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Anti-lifespring stuff 

message: I added a page that describes some of the research on Lifespring from a fairly pro-lifespring standpoint. I wrote to some of the authors mentioned there (Lieberman), and one of them sent me some draft PDFs of the research materials, but not the full citations (I think they are chapters from books, although he said they were drafts of the papers). I'd like to figure out how to cite them properly, but for now I added the "lifespring-scientific-research.com" external link... it accurately represents data from the papers I got from Dr. Lieberman, but emphasises the positive results to the point where I wouldn't describe it as an unbiased source. (looking at the PDFs, the citations are: "In; The Social Psychology of Self-Initiated and Externally Imposed Personal Change Eds. J.D. Fisher, J.M. Chinsley, Y. Klar and A. Nadler Springer-Verlag Press 1992 Perceptions of Changes in the Self: The Impact of Life Events and Large Group Awareness Training Morton A. Lieberman University of California, San Francisco" and "IMPACT OF LARGE GROUP AWARENESS TRAINING; EFFECTS OF LIFESPRING ON PARTICIPANTS' MENTAL HEALTH, SELF CONCEPT ROLE BEHAVIOR, AND PERCEPTIONS OF THEIR INTERPERSONAL ENVIRONMENT MORTON A. LIEBERMAN (UCSF) AND CONSTANCE STILLINGER (STANFORD)" but I can't find official published versions of either of these on amazon or in google scholar.
John Hanley also wrote a book (now out of print) -- I can't think of a reason not to add that now:
Lifespring: Getting Yourself from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by John Hanley; Simon and Schuster 1989 ISBN: 0671725084
Dr. Lieberman graciously responded to a followup email while on vacation, but didn't completely resolve my inability to locate the published versions of his research... he has said he may be able to help further in the future. From his leads, however, it appears I will be likely to be able to find 2 of the 3 articles he descibed in volumes in the UCLA library (since I'm not willing to pay $400 for 3 books from Amazon, 2 of which will contain chapters I want for this...) One article is probably either in:
Self Change: Social Psychological and Clinical Perspectives by Yechiel Klar, Jeffrey D. Fisher, Jack M. Chinsky; Springer (April 1992) ISBN: 0387978119
or
Evaluating a Large Group Awareness Training: A Longitudinal Study of Psychosocial Effects (Recent Research in Psychology) by Roxane Cohen Silver, Jack M. Chinsky, B. Goff, Y. Klar, Jeffrey D. Fisher (Editor); Springer (October 1990) ISBN: 0387973206
( which are listed with slightly different titles on J.D. Fisher's web site ) 
The other article is in:
Handbook of Group Psychotherapy: An Empirical and Clinical Synthesis by Addie Fuhriman (Editor), Gary M. Burlingame (Editor) Wiley; 1st edition (January 15, 1994) ISBN: 0471555924
He also referred to 
GROWTH GROUPS IN THE 1980'S; MENTAL HEALTH IMPLICATIONS by Morton A. Lieberman University of California, San Francisco
but I have no idea if this is a book, a UCSF tech report, or some other sort of document; I can't find it in any of th usual places (google scholar, google, amazon,...).
I intend to add these references once I've consulted the actual books.
I have also been in communication with Lee Ross, who was comissioned to run an independent study on Lifespring around 1985. He is mailing me a copy of that study so I can use it as a primary source. From what he's said, although it is not peer reviewed and was comissioned and published by Lifespring, he had complete autonomy in designing and conducting the study and reporting the results, and as he appears to be a very reputable expert in the field. As far as I can tell without having the papers in hand, both the  and  are not misrepresentative at all, although they are clearly not an unbiased summary of the data, as I assume the actual report will be. 
For what it's worth, I've gone through the Accelerate Trainings variant on this with a generally positive experience. I'm not positive how to address that without editorializing. In the process of deciding whether to do the trainings, I did a good deal of research on the history of Lifespring, and found that there is very little available in terms of unbiased information; almost everyone is either involved in advocacy or opposition, and almost no one cites real references. The "Awareness Page" mentioned above is the most neutral reference I found, although it links to some very non-neutral pages. 
It might be worth adding that both Lifespring and est were created by people who had been involved with a company called "Mind Dynamics," so while they're not the same lineage, they're cousins, of a sort.
Incidentally, I was unsure if it is appropriate to link to the web pages of the organizations mentioned using the lifespring trainings-- Accelerate has one at [accleratetrainings.com], for example, which does include some "scientfic research" but not specific references to peer-reviewed journal papers, as well as (of course) the commercial info for Accelerate. I have never been involved with editing a page this "controversial" before, so I figured I'd put this info in "talk" first, except for a minor spelling edit and adding the "lifespring scientific research" page.
For what it's worth, I thought the external links removed on 4/25/06 were a pretty fair set of pro- and con- references on the web, although they are all of questionable validity given the Wikipedia:Verifiability standards... it doesn't seem accurate to leave the isaccorp link while removing those. Doing a google search "site:isaccorp.org lifespring" I find that they largely site the worst reports about Lifespring on the web, and, at
 says "Leading cult experts including FactNet and Rick Ross have classified Lifespring as a cult." (note: Rick Ross has an entry). Elsewhere () isac just says unattributed "Lifespring has been classified as a cult" in context that appears to be criticising some specific person who used to be a Lifespring trainer. I am not at all sure that any of these groups meet the standards for reliability in Wikipedia:Verifiability, but that's true of most discussions of Lifespring I've found on the web. I suppose the magazine articles cited by these sites at least ostensibly have some editorial standards, so they may be better references for the anti-Lifespring stance from Wikipedia standards.
It's going to take a lot of work to keep this meeting the Wikipedia standards of NPOV, Verifiability, and the "what's a valid primary source" aspect of the No Original Research policies.
I'm going to try to find original "Primary Source" references for everything I can, pro and con, but this is so polarizing a topic, it's pretty hard for a controversial-wikipedia-newbie like me... I'll have to read up on the policies much more than my past wikipedia contributions...
Montyy0 03:15, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lifespring Scientific Research 

message: Very few claims in this article, pro or con, are verified with credible sources.  Please add references where possible or remove unsubstantiated claims. Rfrisbietalk 19:30, 23 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Claims not verified

message: Someone once tried to harangue me to take a program called E3 (I refused).  Searching it on line, I got the impression that it was a successor to Lifespring.  Does anybody know if that's right?
That E3 is apparently gone now, and the stuff I found on line at the time isn't there anymore.  Unfortunately, E3 is apparently also the name of some line of high-tech games, or something like that, so if you search E3, you get bombarded with hits about that.
140.147.160.78 15:37, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  E3, a successor? 

message: This page now seems to be very biased against Lifespring.
Many of the claims on the page are untrue and Jeffpw seems to have taken the editor's lead here.
Jeff, you should attempt to verify some of the claims made on the article and remove the slanted POV in the article.
Mitch
*Every claim in the article is sourced. If you think the article is one-sided, you are more than welcome to add content, providing it is also sourced. It is everyone's right to edit here; it is everyone's responsibility to have their edits be verifiable. Jeffpw 20:36, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Biased