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Efficacy Of Reach Forgiveness For Foreign And Virginia Students, Yin Lin

Theses and Dissertations

People agree that forgiveness is a virtue in essentially all countries. However, different cultures have different ideas about how willing one should forgive and under what circumstances. Although the study occurred in the USA, I recruited both foreign-extraction and Virginia born-and-raised female college students (N=102) to participate a six-hour REACH forgiveness intervention, promoting their forgiveness through psychoeducational groups. In my thesis, I investigated whether students of foreign extraction and Virginia-born students would respond similarly to the intervention. I operationalized culture in two ways—by country and by individual self-reported self-construal. I measured forgiveness using two measures—decisional forgiveness and emotional forgiveness. I …