There is a growing body of opinion that psychology suffers from an elaborate research technology that overemphasizes theory verification and impairs thinking and discovery. Grounded theory is advanced as an approach to research that can address this crisis of method in psychology. The grounded approach is described and illustrated in terms of its application to psychotherapy process research. The emphasis on theory creation characterizing the approach is examined within the history of induction. The challenges to and limitations of grounded theory are discussed. Research leading to this paper was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grants 451-83-3642 and 410-83-1264 to David Rennie. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of D.
The validity of MLU and a measure of syntactic complexity were tested against LARSP on spontaneous speech samples from 87 children, ranging in age from i;6 to 4;9. Change in some LARSP clausal measures was found across MLU stages up to MLU 4.5. For the measure of syntactic complexity, no such ceiling was found for the clausal connectivity score in LARSP or for average clausal complexity in LARSP. Neither MLU nor the measure of syntactic complexity indexed LARSP phrasal complexity. It is concluded that MLU is a valid measure of clausal complexity up to 4-5 and that our measure of syntactic complexity is more valid at more advanced stages.
The present study entailed an examination of the acquisition of counselling skill by inexperienced, undergraduate counsellor trainees as a function of brief, specific instructions on how to counsel, and of the participants' prclraining expectancies pertaining to nondirectivc versus directive counselling style. The Reisman Direction-Unconscious motivation scale was used to identify high versus low directivencss expectancy participants, and the members of each of these iwo groups were randomly assigned to training or control conditions. The training group showed significant training gains on two microcounselling criteria, while the directiveness expectancy variable had no significant effect. The findings vis-a-vis the brief instructions illustrate that a significant training gain can be induced simply by alerting trainees to the evaluative criteria. It was concluded that such instructions could be used both as a highly efficient means of instituting initial counselling skill in paraprofessional workers, and as an apt control in assessing the effect of relatively more extensive counsellor training programs.Substantial research evidence of the effectiveness of human relations training (Carkhuff, 1969) and microcounselling (Ivey, 1971) for training lay and professional counsellors has accumulated in recent years (e.g., Butler & Hansen, 1973;Di Mattia & Arndt, 1974; Ivey, Normington, Miller, Morrell & Haase, 1968). Although these studies indicate that both training methods result in significant gains when trainees are compared with control subjects who receive no training, most of the studies share a design limitation which makes it impossible to separate the effect of the training itself from the effect of information about evaluation criteria. Trainees' progress has usually been evaluated using the same dimensions for the content of training as for rating the acquisition of that training. This raises the possibility that the training gains result, in whole or in part, from the trainees' development of an accurate expectancy set about the evaluation criteria (Resnikoff, 1972; Toukmanian, Capelle & Rennie, This paper is based on a thesis submitted by Georgia K. Quartaro in partial fulfillment of the M.A. degree requirements of York University. The study was supported by Canada Council grant //S74-1820 awarded to D. Rennie and S. Toukmanian. The authors are deeply indebted to Mirka Ondracek of the Institute for Behavioural Research, York University, for her assistance in the data analyses. We also wish to thank John Reisman of DePaul University for giving us permission to modify his Direction-Unconscious motivation scale for use in this study. Requests for reprints should be sent to David I-
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