On 2 Mar 2007 at 23:41, jim guinee wrote:

> "Although the temporal course of the absolute levels of the 5 grief
> indicators
> did not follow that proposed by the stage theory of grief, when
> rescaled
> and examined for each indicator’s peak, the data fit the hypothesized
> sequence exactly."

When Pierre Trudeau resigned from the leadership of the Liberal Party the
first time, he said  to reporters (reprising Nixon's famous whine),  "I'm
kinda sorry I won't have you to kick around anymore". So it's nice to see
that feisty Jim Guinee is still with us. And as his biographers said
about Trudeau, "He haunts us still".

Good point about the reanalysis. Yes, the authors of the grief piece
apparently felt that their primary results were too disturbing to let
stand without massage, and so tried to have it both ways. That
"rescaling" is rather dodgy, though. When the data are allowed to speak
for themselves free of data torturing, they say forthrightly (in the
abstract), "Counter to stage theory, disbelief was not the initial,
dominant grief indicator." It's hard to beat that for clarity.  But the
real news is that at long last someone tried to test the stages
empirically, even if their test was of what the theory has become, not
what Kubler-Ross proposed, and even if they didn't have the courage to
stand by their results.

> Just let us do the work that we know how to do best
> Dr Jim Guinee

I won't return to my long-standing debate with Jim concerning whether
counselling actually helps, and whether professional expertise matters.
But the article below is of interest concerning the willingness of those
in the grief industry to respond to research findings.

Groopman, J. (2004). The grief industry. The New Yorker magazine.
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/040126fa_fact?fact/040126fa_fact

Stephen

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Stephen L. Black, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
Bishop's University                e-mail:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
2600 College St.
Sherbrooke QC  J1M 0C8
Canada

Dept web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy
TIPS discussion list for psychology teachers at
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