Reply to Letters on Religious Meta-analysis

To whom it may concern:

I have been working in a community clinic with several counselors and I am pleased to inform you about the meta-analysis and possibilities I have discovered a future research that could be conducted at my clinic. Research on Religion-Accommodative Counseling: Review and Meta-Analysis by Michael McCullough present meta-analysis data from 5 studies: “Findings suggest that the choice to use religious approaches with religious clients is probably more a matter of client preference than a matter of differential efficacy” (1999.) There is a presumable possibility that more research is needed to expand on our knowledge on whether or not religion should be looked into further as an important facilitator in accommodating the client.

In my opinion meta-analysis becomes important in the Christian counseling setting when a commonality is needed to be discovered across different results and people from backgrounds and issues that concern people working in the counseling field, but that specifically involving religious background. “Koenig, George, and Peterson (1998) reported that depressed people scoring high on measures of intrinsic religiousness were significantly more likely to experience a remission of depression during nearly a 1-year follow-up than were depressed people with lower intrinsic religiousness, even after controlling for 30 potential demographics, psychosocial, and medical confounds” (1999.)

I propose that there is a wider variety of stemming issues when considering Christian counseling and believe that on order to gain any further positive evidence the expansion should include something such as the issue of family involvement; which would be more supplemental in the meta-analysis study on religious accommodation for the Christian counselors. So my research question involves using family involvement as a baseline on whether counseling is in anyway benefited with the involvement of a Christian background. Are the values that stem from families all around impacting the people who enter into counseling sessions that can include anything from depression, suicidal thoughts, and marital issues (current or future effectors.) If people who are coming and have experienced abuse or unrecognized family turmoil come in and present future problems in the area of raising or maintain a family we can then begin to find further development on whether integrating religion affects the maturation and outcome of the person or persons. The dependent variable in this case would be the family/family member being counseled and the independent variable would be the impact of religion being brought into the counseling setting. My outcome measure would use include whether there was a diagnostic criteria was met throughout the desired sessions; this measure would use a nominal measure as the criteria would be categorized by specific sectioned diagnosis.

McCullough, M.E. (1999). Research on religion-accommodative counseling: Review and meta- analysis. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 46(1), p. 92–98.