Dear Reader,
We at the University of Edinburgh are begining a project to try and develop a self-report questionnaire that assesses psychological flexibility (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 2011) in helping professionals. There is increasing evidence to suggest that enhanced flexibility may be of benefit to professionals engaged in helping others. For example, several studies have shown the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Training, which aims to increase participant flexibility, can have a positive impact on practitioner stress levels (e.g. MacConachie et al., 2014; Brinkborg et al., 2011), therapist attributes (Luoma & Vilardaga, 2013; Stafford-Brown & Pakenham, 2012), and willingness to use empirically supported treatments (Varra et al., 2008; Luoma et al., 2007). We hope that this questionnaire will be a valuable tool in exploring these benefits further.
We have generated a large pool of items to include in the questionnaire. Our next step will be recruiting a sample of helping professionals to complete the questionnaire in order to revise and reduce the number of items into a smaller scale. We will then ask a second sample of helping professionals to complete the revised questionnaire in order to further test its performance.
Once the project is complete, I will be uploading a summary of our findings to this blog. This will allow participants who took part in the research and other interested parties to read about the results freely and anonymously.
If you would like any further information about our research, or have any queries, you can contact us using the following details:
- Lead Researcher: Gill Kidney, School of Health in Social Science, Medical School, University of Edinburgh, Teviot Place, Edinburgh EH8 9AG. Email: s1163729@sms.ed.ac.uk
- Research Supervisor: Dr David Gillanders, School of Health in Social Science, Medical School, University of Edinburgh, Teviot Place, Edinburgh EH8 9AG. Email: david.gillanders@ed.ac.uk
Best regards,
Gill Kidney.