The usefulness of behaviour sampling and selected psychometric measures as predictors of success in training child therapists at Exon House

Pynn, Rosalind Ann. (1978) The usefulness of behaviour sampling and selected psychometric measures as predictors of success in training child therapists at Exon House. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

The present study investigated the usefulness of several predictor variables for the selection of effective child therapists working with mentally and physically handicapped people. Several hypotheses were tested: (a) the personality dimensions of neuroticism and introversion are inversely related to success in that those persons high on those dimensions would tend to be the less successful child therapists on the outcome measures of job performance; (b) people with higher expressed social values and (c) more post-secondary education both acquire more knowledge during training and better apply this knowledge on the job; (d) measures obtained from behavioural observation in a pretraining test of application of behaviour modification procedures predict scores on the measures of success, posttraining; (e) knowledge of behaviour modification principles as measured by scores on a written test at pretraining predict scores on measures of success at posttraining. -- Subjects who participated in the study were 24 females who had been selected for summer relief work at Exon House. All candidates completed the Eysenck Personality Inventory and the Allport/Vernon/Lindzey Study of Values tests. The behaviour sampling observations were obtained by having each subject attempt to teach two self-help skills to a resident. The outcome measures obtained following formal training were repetitions of the (a) written test of behaviour modification principles and (b) the behaviour sampling. The results were: (a) years of education was significantly correlated with job success for both outcome measures (p < .01), (b) the more introverted person did better on the written test (p < .05), (c) the ratings from one of the behaviour sampling tasks (dressing) correlated with scores on the posttraining written test (p < .05), (d) the lower a person's religious value scores, the more effective she was on job performance (p < .05). -- The implications of these findings and the failure to find support for several of the hypotheses are discussed in terms of the limitations on experimental control and suggestions for future research.

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