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Research Background

Research Adgenda

My research agenda, endeavours and activities have emanated from my desire to help people. I have pursued this broad goal in two professional contexts; as an educator where my aim is to help students to develop and enhance their potential and as a psychologist where my goal is to help people to cope better with their life circumstances. Consequently, my contributions in the research and scholarship area can be divided into two main areas that relate to my being a teacher and a psychologist. Firstly, I have developed an ongoing program of research that has focused on the enhancement of children's self-concepts and self-esteem and their relationship to achievement and general functioning . Secondly, I have researched in the counselling psychology (school counsellor's role, function and training and the outcomes of counselling within a learning framework) and psychiatric areas (bereavement , HIV, suicide, terminal illness). In the pursuit of my goal to help people to maximise their potential in both educational and stressful contexts I have found it necessary to develop instruments to measure human behaviour. This has lead to a keen interest in scale development and construction.

Scholarly Contribution

My major scholarly contribution has been in the area of defining self-variables (self-talk, self-concept, self-esteem) in children and evaluating the factors that impact on their development. My interest in this area developed when as a primary school teacher I noticed that many children did not have confidence in themselves despite having good academic skills. The focus of my research endeavours since 1983, when I first wrote in the area, has been on investigating ways that significant others (parents and teachers) can enhance children's perceptions of themselves in specific areas and to help them to feel more confident in themselves as people. I have developed four self-enhancement programs and evaluated their impact as well as providing inservice experiences for teachers in this area. I have developed scales to measure self-esteem, self-concept, self-talk, behavioural indicators of self-esteem, and positive and negative statements made by significant others using my scale construction skills and all have been published in international journals (Psychology in the Schools, Educational Psychology, School Psychology International, Journal of Rational-Emotive and Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, Journal of Humanistic Education and Development). I have investigated the impact of positive and negative statements made by significant others and closeness to significant others on children's self-talk, self-concepts and self-esteem. This work has relevance to both parents and teachers and has been published in the Journal of Family Studies and SET: Research Information for Teachers and led to national and international radio interviews as well as a national television appearance.

Counselling and Pscyhology Interest

My interest in counselling psychology and psychiatric research emerged as a result of a placement in a psychiatric hospital as a part of my doctoral training in counsellor education/counselling psychology. I have had an ongoing relationship with the Psychiatry Department at University of Queensland and have been an active partner in research teams that have received grants to conduct research in the areas of bereavement, HIV, post-traumatic stress disorder, and the wish to hasten death in the terminally ill. I have joint publications as a result of this involvement in the areas of bereavement, suicide, the psychological aspects of HIV infection and the wish to hasten death in the terminally ill. Within the counselling area I have an ongoing interest in decision-making and the processes people use to make decisions. In recent times, I have researched and published in the professional counselling area. My work has focussed on school counsellors' perceptions of their role and function in future times and on assessing the outcomes of counselling within a learning framework.

Scale Development and Construction

As a part of pursuing my research interests I found that I needed to develop measurement instruments to assist with answering my research questions and because valid and reliable measures for many of the variables that I was interested in studying were not available. Consequently, I developed a specific interest in the use of conventional and confirmatory factor analytic techniques in the development and validation of scales that measure human behaviour.