Date
12-19-2022
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree
Master of Arts in Professional Writing (MA)
Chair
Tess Martinus
Keywords
professional writing, intervention design, helping professions, bibliotherapy, Dean Barnlund, John Dewey, Louise Rosenblatt, serious mental illness, moral therapy, multi-grounded action research, heuristics
Disciplines
Communication | Reading and Language
Recommended Citation
Haney, Natalie Marie, "Bibliotherapy in the Helping Professions: A Heuristic Model for Intervention Design" (2022). Masters Theses. 941.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/masters/941
Abstract
I propose a new approach to examining bibliotherapy’s usefulness in the community-based care of individuals with serious mental illness (SMI), focused on producing a heuristic that benefits helping professionals who offer non-clinical and non-psychiatric services. Meant for writers designing bibliotherapy interventions in the helping professions, I conceptualize bibliotherapy in a model against the backdrop of community-based care’s history. A model has the potential to allow each writer to conduct situation-specific inquiry, invent bibliotherapy intervention designs suited to the unique needs of the profession’s help-seekers, and reflect on knowledge generated for intervention reiteration. Referring to Dewey, Rosenblatt and Barnlund to create a cohesive theoretical framework, I hypothesize that before bibliotherapy can be reliably operationalized in real-life settings, it must be conceptualized with fidelity to the processes of reading and communication. Departing from empiricism, I select multi-grounded action research as a pragmatic methodology for solution design that mirrors the writing process.
