JOURNAL ARTICLE REVIEW - Essay Example

Journal Article Review The article “Addressing Pastoral Knowledge and Attitudes about Clergy/Mental Health Care Practitioner Collaboration” talks about the evaluation on the capacity of clergy members to promote the well-being of parishioners. It is found that clergy are not that prepared to meet the mental health needs of parishioners, which may potentially imply a significant stress level on the former. This is due to the fact that participants are most likely to refer to mental health professionals or counseling centers instead of other community resources including the services offered by the clergy for their needs on mental health care.

This result seems to have a significant impact on the diverse population about the kind of trust that people especially the parishioners would give to the clergy members. The clergy is expected to assess or meet the spiritual needs of the parishioners that at some point should potentially encompass mental health concerns. For instance, there are different and various issues that could be substantially addressed by the clergy including but not limited to family troubles, addiction, bad behaviors and so on.

All of these could potentially be addressed using God’s word. If it has to be critically considered, God’s word would somehow be sufficient to address various forms of mental health needs of the people (Swinton, 2001). Thus, the potential implication of the said research is the need to develop partnerships between the clergy members and mental health practitioners. In other words, the said study would somehow reveal that in order for the diverse population to have strong confidence in the clergy’s ability to address their mental health concerns, technical skills or capabilities on counseling should strongly be enhanced or aligned with mental health professionals or counseling centers, beforehand.

However, the whole study at some point could still be inconclusive knowing the fact that it only consists of small number of samples which are dominated by old, Caucasian male. Participants included in the study are all Protestants, but out of the 276 surveys distributed only the response of 74 respondents are considered in the analysis due to some validity reasons. This means that the number of sample itself could not be remarkably considered to represent the entire population under study.

Furthermore, the said study may turn out like having the entire result only from a focus group considering the dominance of Caucasian, old male, which consisted the 81 percent of the whole samples. In addition, around 77 percent of the participants do not have that much significant knowledge about mental health. In other words, there may be a good point to question the validity of the research knowing the fact that majority of the participants do not have much deeper understanding about mental health concerns.

Thus, it is just implied that the result revealed most of the respondents would rely on mental health professionals and other mental health care providers. Based on the above observations, all of them are potential indicators of threats to validity that may be either external or internal in their forms (Gravetter & Forzano, 2011). In other words, although there might have been existing truth about the result, still the entire study is still under the significant impact of threats to validity.

ReferencesGravetter, F. J., & Forzano, L. B. (2011). Research Methods for the Behavioral Sciences (4th ed.). Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning. Swinton, J. (2001). Spirituality and mental health care: rediscovering a ‘forgotten’ dimension. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.