A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF DIMENSIONS OF HEALTHY FUNCTIONING BETWEEN FAMILIES PRACTICING THE TM PROGRAM FOR FIVE YEARS OR FOR LESS THAN A YEAR.
Contributors: University of Pittsburgh.
Published: 1984
Number of pages: 113
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.
Description: The problem investigated stated: How do healthy families who have practiced the Transcendental Meditation (TM) Program for five years or more differ from healthy families with less than one year experience in the following areas of their families' functioning: (1) structure of the family; (2) mythology; (3) goal-directed negotiations; (4) autonomy; (5) family affect and, (6) global health-pathology scale.

The sample consisted of 23 families from the Washington, D.C. and greater Pittsburgh area. All participants were volunteers. The experiment took place over a three month period. Each family was interviewed by a hired interviewer. The interview was video-taped by the researcher. Then each tape was rated independently by two psychiatric clinical specialist nurses, using the Beavers' Timberlawn Evaluation Scale.

The Whitney-Mann U Test was used to test the statistical hypotheses. Findings in all six areas proved to be statistically significant at the .05 level. Long-term meditating families scores were consistently lower than short-term, meditating families scores on all dimensions of the Beavers-Timberlawn Evaluation Scale. Thus long-term meditating families had higher levels of health than short-term meditating families. Furthermore, when the means of both long-term and short-term meditating families were compared to the normal, healthy family means derived from the Beaver-Timberlawn study, it was found that the long-term meditating families were more psychologically healthy. The short-term meditating families scores were in a similar range to the Beaver-Timberlawn normal families scores. Thus the long-term meditating were found to be psychologically more healthy than either the short-term meditating families or the normal, healthy families in the Beavers-Timberlawn study.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-10, Section: B, page: 3206.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH, 1984.

School code: 0178.