Item Detail
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12567
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0
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0
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English
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A Descriptive Study of the Experience of Helping in the Lives of Latter-day Saint Women
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Provo, UT
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Brigham Young University
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Ph.D diss.
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The helping experience was examined as it occurred in the routine lives of married, LDS women, who had dependent children, and who did not work outside the home. In a design in which the participants kept a journal for seven days, followed by an in-depth interview, the written and oral helping experiences were analyzed in their entirety as they flowed from antecedents, through the helping act itself, and finally to the effects arising from the helping.
A model, the Nielson Model of the Experience of Helping, was developed, which accounts for the data and illustrates the unfolding of a helping experience.
It was found that the focus of attention was central to the outcome of the helping act. When the helper's attention was on herself she followed a self-focus pathway. When the focus was other-centered, she followed an other focus pathway.
Considerations of costs and benefits, priorities, and personal capabilities to render aid, were encountered in the data and depicted in the model.
Whether the focus was on the self or the other while rendering service was determined by the participant's ultimate goals. Those personal ultimate goals impacted both the awareness the participants had of needs around them, as well as their initial reaction to an awareness of need, whether it was one of empathy, distress or self-concern.
There was found to be a relationship between motivation to help and the effects of helping. When the women in the study were self-focused during the helping experience they had feelings such as guilt, frustration, impatience, and unhappiness. When they were other-centered in their motivations they were fulfilled, content, happy, and peaceful. All participants reported other-centered ultimate goals, which may account for positive responses found with other-centered helping, and negative responses for self-focus helping.
These women served children, husbands, extended family, neighbors and acquaintances, church, school, and community with little concern for themselves. There does appear to be genuine altruism in which the women helped needy others at significant cost to herself, with no thought of personal benefit.