Effects of counselors' etiology attributions on college students' procrastination.

Abstract

Clients come to counseling with personal theories about their problems' etiology. Counselors bring other hypotheses to the table. Counselors may be more helpful either when they accept clients' theories or when they provide new ones. A third option is that problem etiology is irrelevant in finding solutions. This study tested the cognitive dissonance theory of interpretations (L. Levy, 1963; S. R. Strong, J. A. Welsh, J. L. Corcoran, & W. T. Hoyt, 1992), which argues that discrepant interpretations are most helpful. Eighty two college-aged procrastinators (25 men, 57 women; ages 17-23, M = 18) interacted with a counselor who (a) agreed with them about procrastination's causes, (b) disagreed with them, or (c) said it was not important to specify a cause. Contrary to prediction, the 3rd condition led to more improvement in participants' self-reported procrastination. This finding is discussed in terms of possible responsibility attributions implicit in the 3rd condition.

Goal agreement and early therapeutic change.

“…Yet, Claiborn, Ward, and Strong (1981) reported the importance of clienttherapist attribution agreement to improvement in procrastination, providing support for aphenomenological approach. A recent study by Cook (2000) failed to find a significant relation between client-therapist attribution discrepancy or agreement and improvement in procrastination. In his study, participants who received brief therapeutic services that offered no causal explanation for their problems demonstrated greater improvement than participants who received interventions offering congruent or incongruent causal explanations (Cook, 2000).…”

Efficacy of Coherence Therapy in the Treatment of Procrastination and Perfectionism

“…In their clearest maladaptive forms, however, both procrastination and perfectionism have been well recognized as problems but there are relatively few controlled treatment studies for procrastination and perfectionism. Available evidence suggests that treatment success has been mixed (e.g., Cook, 2000; Mulry, Fleming, & Gottschalk, 1994). Treatment success may be inconsistent for several reasons.…”

Problem attribution and intervention. The interpretation of problem causations and solutions in regard of Brickmanet al.

“…Contemporary changes in cultural problem perception (for example, Allen 1981, Beckett and Western 2000, Garland 2001, Gregory and Holloway 2005, O'Neill 2005 seem to have opened the floodgates for the work in this field. Recently, a series of studies has used the BT to examine the way in which professionals or their clients perceive problems (for example, Blomquist 1998, Cook 2000, Kernes and McWirther 2001, Clary and Thieman 2002, Järvinen 2002, Kloss and Lisman 2003, Sotirovic 2003, Palm 2004, O'Neill 2005, Stepleman et al 2005.…”

“…This could be taken further to the questions regarding how users of social work perceive their own problems and how their non-professional problem definitions are changed when they are confronted with professional problem perceptions. Studies which are addressing these topics (for example, Claiborn et al 1981, Cook 2000 are promising to understand the outcome of social workers' professional actions. Note 1.…”