Experience of Training - Research Proposal Example

Running Head: EXPERIENCE OF TRAINING Experience of Training [Name of the Author] [Name of the University] Experience of Training Introduction People attribute events, particularly successes and failures, to causes, whether they are real or imagined. (Wong, 2001, 650) Such causal attributions may be classified in several dimensions, such as internality (due to oneself or to external factors), stability, pervasiveness, and controllability. (Weiner, 2005, 548) These dimensions can be used to measure, by questionnaire, or content analysis, an individual's characteristic attributional style, which correlates with susceptibility to clinical depression and physical illness, risk of relapse in depression, low motivation and poor achievement in education and athletics, job satisfaction, and sales performance. (Corr , 2005, 241) Individuals who typically attribute their failures to internal, stable, and global factors, and their successes to external, temporary, and specific causes, are most vulnerable to poor persistence, impaired performance, and depression. (Abramson, 1998, 50) Clinically, cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) can modify attributional style, and can have beneficial effects in depression and other psychiatric disorders. (Hawton, 1999, Press) Unemployment is associated with personal, financial, and social restrictions, which can affect psychological health. The proportion of unemployed people who score above the cut-off point for "psychiatric caseness" on the general health questionnaire (GHQ) (Goldberg, 2002, Press) is typically 60%, compared with 20% among employed groups. (Warr, 2004, 4) Long-term unemployment typically brings further difficulties, such as psychological changes that can prevent re-employment. (Warr, 1998, 47) Reduced self-esteem, self-efficacy, and expectations of success all decrease the likelihood of a successful outcome in job-seeking, or may reduce the motivation to seek work at all. Many long-term unemployed people cease to believe in their ability to regain employment. (Eden, 2003, 353) The personal cost of unemployment can, therefore, be substantial. There are also, of course, substantial costs to society. There is a clear need for interventions to assist unemployed people to reduce the negative psychological impacts of unemployment and to help them back into work. However, little psychological assistance is given. Most re-employment programmes aim to clarify job goals, to provide job-seeking or job-related skills, or to resocialise unemployed people to the work environment. There have been few empirically assessed interventions, and those assessed so far have proved to be of little use. (Goldstein, 2003) Three studies that described psychological interventions, however, have reported encouraging results. A programme to improve self-efficacy in job-seeking led to higher rates of re-employment; job-search behaviour was the major mediator through which high self-efficacy was converted into re-employment. (Eden, 2003, 355) A social-support and problem-solving intervention resulted in increases in quantity and quality of re-employment, but no difference in job-seeking behavior. (Caplan, 1999, 760)) Expressive writing by job-seekers about the thoughts and feelings surrounding job loss increased re-employment success, but did not change job-seeking behaviour. (Spera, 2004, 722) To date, however, no psychological intervention derived from an empirically validated psychotherapy technique has been formally investigated. Our occupational training programme, based on the principles of CBT (table 1), aims to help people identify and modify their attributional style. We assessed the effectiveness of the programme in a group of long-term unemployed professional people, who were likely to experience repeated failure in job-finding. We compared the effects on mental health, job-seeking activities, and success in job-finding with those of a social-support programme in a similar control group. The primary outcome measure of the study was obtaining full-time employment. Methodology Professional people of standard occupational classification (Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, 2000) groups 1, 2, 3, and 7 (managerial, administrative, professional, technical, and sales) who had been unemployed for longer than 12 months were recruited via newspaper advertisements, mail shots, the UK Employment Service, and a major out-placement company (Sanders & Sidney). Calculations to ascertain the sample size needed for sufficient statistical power were based on the endpoint of change in attributional style (effect size calculated by subtracting mean attributional style in control group from that in CBT group, divided by 1 SD); the calculations were based on a previous study. (Proudfoot, 1996, 40) We found that 70 participants per group were needed (effect size 0.6, significance level 0.05, power 80%). To allow for attrition and to ensure sufficient power by the follow-up phase of the experiment, a sample size of 95 people per group was set. We used a controlled, experimental, two-group design. We initially planned to have an additional no-training control group. However, recruitment was unexpectedly difficult, perhaps because of the very psychological sequelae of long-term unemployment that our programme was targeting. To maintain sufficient statistical power in the study we therefore dispensed with this control group. The CBT programme had been previously compared with a wait-list control condition in our study of insurance sales personnel, among whom there is also a high rate of rejection and failure. (Proudfoot, 1996) To compensate for the lack of a no-treatment control group, outcome figures from the UK Department of Employment programmes, attendance at which is a standard requirement for all people registered as unemployed, were used as a baseline comparison. 289 people volunteered to take part in the study (figure 1). They were randomly assigned to two groups: the CBT group (n=145) or, to control for the Hawthorne effect, (Roethlisberger, 1999, Press) the control group, which undertook a programme that emphasised social support26 (n=144). Social support has been shown to moderate the negative psychological consequences of unemployment (Ullah, 2005, 283) and was, therefore, thought to be a suitable control for the CBT programme. Allocation was generated by a random numbers table. Throughout the study, participants were not aware that two different interventions were being used. Investigators were aware of group allocation, but were accompanied in all programmes by co-trainers who were non-investigators. 244 people started the programmes (CBT n=134, control n=110). The mean age was 43 years in both groups (ranges 23-62 CBT, 23-61 control). The mean duration of unemployment was 25.8 months in the CBT group, and 23.1 months in the control group (range The two programmes (table 1) were based on widely accepted principles of training (Tannenbaum, 2002, 400) and matched for all variables (eg, format, structure, inclusion of "homework") except detailed content and specific strategies. Both programmes targeted professional people (although the techniques are equally suitable for manual workers) to enable specific job-seeking issues and activities to be addressed. The CBT programme included techniques such as eliciting, recording, and testing the validity of thoughts, reattribution, behavioural monitoring, and experimentation. Weekly homework projects between the sessions helped participants to apply the techniques to their job-seeking activities. In the final session, participants were taught how to use the programme strategies to maintain the changes they had made to their thinking and behaviour, and to overcome future difficulties they might encounter. The social support programme focused on helping participants to explore and strengthen their social and professional networks, with related activities to complete between sessions. (Full details of the programmes are available from the authors.) Both groups attended 3 h sessions once a week for 7 weeks in subgroups of between ten and 15 people. Each session was run by two psychologists, one of whom, in most cases, was JP. 209 participants completed the training and were included in the analyses. This total includes ten (three CBT, seven control; p=0.23) who obtained jobs or went on full-time courses during the training period. 31 (20 CBT, 11 control; p=0.34) withdrew from the study, mostly after the first and third sessions. The data were incomplete for a further four participants. Before training started, all participants completed several questionnaires to assess psychological characteristics relevant to job-seeking (table 2). The questionnaires were administered again after the final session and 3-4 months later. Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), with pretest scores as covariates and post-test or follow-up scores as dependent variables, was used to test for differences between the groups resulting from the intervention. Data were analysed with SPSS/PC version 4. We collected data on job-seeking activity from daily entries by each participant into a log-book to record the number of different job-seeking activities (eg, seeking information about an advertised job, making a speculative approach to a potential employer, attending an interview, making telephone calls, completing a job application) and the number of hours spent each day in job-seeking. We collected information on job-finding success 4 months after course completion by means of a questionnaire. Differences between the two groups in measures of job-seeking activity were assessed by ANCOVA. Where the assumptions underlying ANCOVA were not met, the data were plotted to ascertain the exact nature of the slopes and converted to change scores (before to after intervention; before intervention to follow-up), and an analysis of the change scores was done by t tests. This method for testing group differences is less satisfactory than ANCOVA, but it does provide a way of taking into account the effect of preintervention scores on outcomes. Differences between the two groups in job-finding success were assessed by chi2 tests or, for smaller frequencies, by Fisher's exact test. Results A score on the GHQ of 5 or above is taken to indicate "psychiatric caseness". At entry to the trial 80 (59%) of CBT-assigned participants and 59 (54%) control-assigned participants scored 5 or higher (p=0.42). The overall proportion (57%) is similar to that in previous reports on unemployed people. (Warr, 2004, 10) After training, the proportion scoring 5 or higher on the GHQ was significantly reduced in both the CBT group (to 29 [21%], p Read More