ANALYSIS OF FAMILY OF ORIGIN CHARACTERISTICS IN MENTAL HEALTH COUNSELORS, MARRIAGE AND FAMILY THERAPISTS, AND NURSING TRAINEES (MARRIAGE THERAPISTS).
Contributors: University of Akron.
Published: 1993
Number of pages: 202
Subjects: Education, Guidance and Counseling.; Psychology, Clinical.; Psychology, Social.; Health Sciences, Education.; Health Sciences, Nursing.
Description: The purpose of this study was to examine family of origin characteristics of helping professional trainees to provide data which would benefit those involved in training this population. There seems to be a general consensus in the literature that mental health professionals are wounded healers or that they come from families that are dysfunctional to some degree. Counselors have been described, both empirically and anecdotally, as having come from families with enmeshed boundaries, where they have been triangulated to some degree, and where they took on caretaking roles in their families of origin. It has been suggested that this description does not hold true across helping professions but is valid only for mental health professionals, and that it is most descriptive of marital and family therapists. As trainees can be expected to reenact family of origin interactions in their work, it would be of benefit to trainees to be made aware of less functional interactions they may be likely to utilize.

This study used an ex post facto research design. The data were collected in the classrooms of a northeast Ohio university. Students in the nursing program, marriage and family program, and the counseling program were asked to volunteer. The sample consisted of 101 graduate students.

Those students who volunteered to participate in this study completed two scales from the Personal Authority in the Family System Questionnaire, Intergenerational Fusion and Intergenerational Triangulation, the Children's Role Inventory, and Rotter's Internal-External Locus of Control Scale. The hypotheses were tested using multiple discriminant analysis; discriminant analysis was used for post hoc testing.

No significant differences were found between groups. This study did not support the hypothesis that marriage and family trainees came from less functional families than counselor trainees or that there would be a difference between mental health trainees and nurse trainees. Respondents largely perceived themselves to have been family Heroes. Relative to their families of origin, respondents were triangulated to a degree similar to the clinical norms and fused to a degree somewhat similar to clinical norms.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-08, Section: A, page: 2893.

Thesis (PH.D.)--THE UNIVERSITY OF AKRON, 1993.

School code: 0003.