Open AccessThe effectiveness of forgiveness therapy for wives of alcoholics
Author(s) -
Hee Kyung Kim,
Kunsook S. Bernstein
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
journal of nursing education and practice
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1925-4059
pISSN - 1925-4040
DOI - 10.5430/jnep.v7n12p72
Subject(s) - forgiveness , psychology , clinical psychology , repeated measures design , analysis of variance , test (biology) , experimental research , affect (linguistics) , medicine , social psychology , paleontology , statistics , mathematics education , biology , mathematics , communication
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of forgiveness therapy for wives of alcoholics in South Korea suffering from emotional abuse by their spouses.Methods: Non-randomized quasi-experimental research was conducted with 2-hour weekly forgiveness therapy sessions for 12 weeks, and pre-test, post-test, and a 12-week follow-up test. A total number of 28 subjects were divided into two groups: 15 in the experimental group and 13 in the control group. The data were analyzed by descriptive statistics, t-test, χ2 test, and repeated measure ANOVA, using SPSS 20.0.Results: The experimental group showed a significantly higher score on the forgiveness scale than did the control group (t = 0.312, p < .010) and the 12-week follow-up test (F = 4.43, p = .039). In the subcategories of the forgiveness scale, affect and cognition scores were significantly increased but there was no significant change on the behavior score.Conclusions: These findings suggest that forgiveness therapy may be an effective intervention program to improve forgiveness for the emotionally abused wives of alcoholics.