Help-giving Behaviors Research Articles

Hairdressers as caregivers. I. A descriptive profile of interpersonal help-giving involvements.

The interpersonal help-giving behaviors of 90 hairdressers were explored in depth in an interview study. On the average, hairdressers saw 55 customers a week, and talked 25 minutes with each. About one-third of the talking time concerned clients' moderate to serious personal problems--particularly problems with children, physical health, marriage, depression, and anxiety. Hairdressers reported that offering sympathy and support, being lighthearted, just listening, and presenting alternatives were among their most frequent response strategies. Although they often enjoyed fielding clients' personal problems, at times they felt perplexed by them. Hairdressers perceived listening to customers' interpersonal problems to be an important part of their everyday function and expressed a need for professional inputs in that domain.

Children's Causal Attributions regarding Help Giving

SMrrH, CATHLEEN L.; GELFAND, DONNA M.; HARTMANN, DONALD P.; and PARTLOW, MARJORIE E. Y. Children's Causal Attributions regarding Help Giving. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1979, 50, 203-210. This experiment examined the conditions under which children attribute their helpgiving behavior to external sources rather than to a personal disposition to help. Secondand third-grade children earned pennies which could be saved to purchase a prize or donated to help a needy peer. Children who received only social consequences (praise or rebuke) or no consequences for donating attributed their behavior to a desire to help or a concern for the other child. In contrast, children who were given material consequences (penny rewards for donating or fines for not donating) together with social consequences were more likely to attribute their help giving to external sources. Those given material consequences and informed of the contingency offered the most extrinsic attributions. Children remembered the material consequences more accurately than the social consequences. Method of training had no effect on later donating during unconsequated test trials.

Hairdressers and helping: Influencing the behavior of informal caregivers.

Six hairdressers who participated in a 10-week group mental health consultation and training program were compared with seven control hairdressers on pre- andposttests of an inventory designed to assess helping strategies. Although on the pretest both groups heavily used the strategies of advice giving and presenting alternatives, only program participants showed an increase in the response strategy named Reflection of feelings on the posttest. The consultation program included goals such as (a) maximizing helping effectiveness through modeling and (b) education about referrals within the local mental health network. It is suggested that training in interpersonal help giving be offered to other groups of informal caregivers. One major goal of the community mental health movement is to expand the helping services by using nonprofessionals. This use of paraprofessionals involves creating new roles within established institutional settings, or, as an alternative, using mental health consultation to train nonprofessionals to work outside of a traditional mental health setting. These people, sometimes called informal caregivers, have recently begun to receive increased attention from community psychologists (Caplan & Killilea, 1976; Collins & Pancoast, 1976), who point out that people in distress often take their problems to sympathetic individuals within their immediate psychological environment. Although these individuals work independently of mental health professionals and have no mental health training, nonetheless they play vital roles and in some strata of society may be the sole resource for interpersonally distressed peers (Collins, 1973). Hairdressers are a potentially valuable source of natural caregivers. The present investigation grew out of an interview survey of 90 hairdressers in the Rochester, New York, area (Cowen, Gesten, Boike, Norton, Wilson, & DeStefano, in press) designed to systematically examine the interpersonal help-giving behaviors of hairdressers, as well as to assess the type and extent of personal problems brought up by customers. The survey collected data about hairdressers' backgrounds, the types of customers the hairdressers contact, the nature of verbal interactions hairdressers have with their clients, and how the hairdressers deal with their clients' personal concerns. It was found that approximately one third of the time hairdressers spent talking to customers was devoted to discussion of moderate-to-serious problems and that the hairdressers wanted professional consultation in their roles as helpers. The present article describes a program to assess helping strategies of a subgroup of these hairdressers before and after participation in a 10-week health consultation and training experience.