Forgiveness as an educational intervention goal for persons at the end of life.

摘要

The purpose of this study was to explore the use of an educational intervention that focused upon the promotion of forgiveness for persons with unresolved emotional injuries at the end of life. Participants included persons diagnosed with terminal cancer that expressed issues of deep emotional pain due to unresolved conflicts or past emotional injuries. A yoked randomized experimental and control group design was used. The study included twenty participants. Ten participants were randomly selected for the experimental group, and ten for the control group. Participants were matched on the variables of age, gender, degree of illness, and nature of emotional injury. The control group served as a support condition. The educational intervention, which was four sessions in length, was provided on an individual basis. The control group participants began the intervention when their matched pair completed the intervention. Follow-up measures occurred with the experimental group four weeks after completion of the educational intervention. Hypotheses of the study were supported and included: (1) The experimental group (participants receiving the intervention) compared with the support condition control group would demonstrate significantly higher gains in forgiveness toward their offender, hope, quality of life measures, and significant reductions in anger from pretest to post-test. (2) The second experimental group (following the control group condition) would demonstrate significantly higher gains from post-test one (before the intervention) to post-test two (after the intervention) in forgiveness toward their offender, hope, and quality of life measures, and significant reductions in anger. (3) There would be no significant differences in forgiveness toward the offender, hope, quality of life, and anger measures between the first experimental group for the period of pretest to post-test one (immediately following the intervention) and the second experimental group for the period of post-test one to post-test two (immediately following the intervention). (4) It was anticipated that significant improvements achieved from pretest to post-test for the experimental group would be maintained at the time of follow-up when compared with the control group turned experimental from post-test one to post-test two.