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Telephone Crisis Intervention: Empathy And Conceptual Level, Paul J. Seymour

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The telephone crisis intervention service at Utah State University (Help-Line) was evaluated in order to make the training program accountable and to produce recommendations for improvement in volunteer training.

Help-Line training teaches a "non-directive" counseling model and incorporates experiential sensitivity type exercises, didactic discussion, and role playing.

Help-Line volunteers were assessed by two methods. The first was a pretest-posttest control group design. Training was the independent variable and the discrimination of core conditions (as measured by the Crisis Center Discrimination Index) and the communication of empathy (as measured by the Crisis Center Communication Index) were the dependent variables. The Indexes …