Choice of religious or secular counselors based on faith development and topic of therapy.

Abstract

This study examined the effects of faith development and to alcohol and drug counseling, depression and anxiety counseling, and severe mental illness counseling. The third hypothesis tested was that there would be no difference of preferences between genders. There were 151 participants in this study. Eighty-two were women and 69 were men. The participants were given the Fowler Religious Attitudes Scale to measure their level of faith development and also completed a counselor preference survey to measure their preferred type of counselor for each topic of therapy. A 2 x 4 x 2 repeated measures analysis of variance was used to analyze that data. The test for the first hypothesis showed a strong overall preference for non-religious counselors. The second hypothesis test showed a significant interaction between faith development level and topic of therapy. This test also confirmed the third hypothesis as no difference existed between genders. The Tukey-Kramer procedure was used to detect the true differences between means. The results of the first hypothesis are in contradiction to past research. In this study, there was a strong preference for non-religious counseling. The results did not support the second hypothesis. It was found that people who were lower in faith development preferred religious counseling more than the higher faith developed group. A limitation of this study was that the faith development scale that was used measured a conceptualized notion of faith development and not religiosity as other studies have done. Suggestions for further research would be to use measures of intelligence in making comparisons between groups and also comparing results of the Fowler Religious Attitudes Scale to those measuring moralistic thinking.