The Family Therapy of Attempted Suicide

Suicidal behavior is a multidetermined act based upon a variety of factors among which family tensions and patterns of interaction predominate. Family therapy, nevertheless, is underutilized for suicidal situations because too few practitioners possess the requisite skills in both suicidology and family treatment. This paper attempts to integrate the two fields, describes some assessment procedures, and presents an account of the method of family therapy utilized by the author with suicidal persons. The basic goals of therapy are to help initiate and to catalyze a healing process that will enable the participants to accept changes in both individual and family existence; to decrease the amount of destructive family interaction; to deal with the inevitable anxiety that accompanies growth and development; to make contact with and among the family members; and to provide hope.     

Retention,Role Modeling,and Academic Readiness: A Perspective on the Ethnic Minority Student in Higher Education

This article discusses retention, role modeling, and academic readiness as these issues relate to ethnic minority students in higher education. The central points of the discussion revolve around the need to stem the unusually high rates of attrition of minority students through academic role modeling and recognition of the concept of delayed academic readiness. Methods of implementing a mentor-student program are also suggested.     

Paramodeling Effects in Counselor Training

This study was based on the hypothesis that modeling techniques utilized in counselor training may foster unintended and often undetected behaviors in counseling trainees. Samples of counselor trainees viewed either a series of expert modeling or coping modeling video-tapes. Specifically, it was hypothesized that counselor trainees who viewed expert models would illustrate concommitant or paramodeling phenomena by exhibiting a decrease in anxiety toward participation in a counseling interview. Similarly, it was predicted that those who viewed the coping models would demonstrate paramodeling phenomena by exhibiting an increase in tolerance of ambiguity. Results confirmed the hypotheses across the first sample, the cross-validation sample, and both samples combined. Implications regarding counselor training are discussed.     

A Counselor's Guide to the Assessment of Depression

This article discusses various methods and procedures for assessing depression in clients. The following eight clinician rating and client self-report measures of depression are reviewed on the basis of their psychometric properties and applied pragmatic utility: the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, the Beck Depression Inventory, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Scale 2 (Depression), the Depression Adjective Checklists, the Multiple Affect Adjective Checklist, the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale, the Hopkins Symptom Checklist-90, and the Children's Depression Inventory.     

A METHOD FOR ESTABLISHING THE REPRESENTATIONAL VALIDITY OF INTERACTION CODING SYSTEMS: DO WE SEE WHAT THEY SEE?

This paper offers a new methodological approach to establishing the validity of interaction coding schemes, and it reports research which applies these procedures to three coding systems that have been used to study small group decision making: Bales' (1950) Interaction Process Analysis System, Fisher's (1970) Decision Proposal Coding System, and Mabry's (1975) Pattern Variable Coding System. The procedures offered here provide a method for determining whether the functions or constructs identified by a coding system are part of the common meanings ascribed to the participants in the interaction. Of the three coding systems evaluated in the study, the IPA System represented subjects' interpretations of decision-making interaction better than the Decision Proposal System, which, in turn, performed better than the Pattern Variable System.