The reactions of professionals reviewing a training manual ...

Bitsakos, Steven. (2005). The Reactions of Professionals Reviewing a Training Manual on Anger Management with Developmentally Disabled Adults (Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2005). UMI _.

This phenomenological study examined the reactions of people in the field of professional psychology who read an anger management training manual. Most people in any given field, including psychology, find that training manuals are boring and cumbersome to read and difficult to abstract information from. They are often detailed and contain a lot of information that is not easily accessible for the person looking for instant information for a specific question. Professional psychologists and therapists at times need information that can be accessed in crisis and emergency situations in dealing with mentally ill people. Very often, they do not have time to look through a detailed training manual to find a crisis intervention they can use at the time of a crisis. This study took all this information into account.

A purely phenomenological method was used to explore the specific information that professionals in the field of psychology are looking for in a behavioral training manual. The researcher created an anger management training manual from his own experiences in dealing with the mentally retarded/severely mentally ill population at his internship. A series of anger management classes were given to this population, and an anger management training manual was created with behavioral interventions. After the anger management training manual was created, the researcher gave it to five people to review. Participants were asked to keep in mind specific questions having to do with their reactions to the training manual while reviewing it over a week’s time. They were then asked to come back and report to the researcher the strengths and weaknesses they found in the training manual. The researcher then created a second manual based on the participants’ feedback and recommendations. The researcher’s hope is that the revised anger management training manual is easier to read and use for any professional in the field of psychology dealing with the mentally retarded/severely mentally ill population.