A Meta-Analysis” by Thomas W. Baskin and Robert D. Enright
The meta-analysis study “Intervention Studies on Forgiveness: A Meta-Analysis” by Thomas W. Baskin and Robert D. Enright involved publishing nine studies with a total population of 330 participants. The study investigated the efficacy of forgiveness interventions in counseling. Several reviews of theories of forgiveness were conducted. To be included in the meta-analysis, a study needed to be empirical, have had a control group, have a quantitative measure of forgiveness, and must have been published in a refereed journal. The methods involved searching for electronic databases to identify all the relevant studies, then the researchers used the references of the selected studies to identify more studies, and finally, the qualitative reviews of the forgiveness literature were examined.
The results indicated that the nine studies needed to be divided into three categories, including decisions-based, process-based group, and process-based individual intervention. Several conclusions could be deduced from the study. The first conclusion was that the low scores obtained from the decisions-based group compared to the scores in the other groups supported the idea of significant effectiveness of the process models of forgiveness. Secondly, the high scores observed in longer-term individual counseling compared to the medium-term group counseling showed that time and energy have a significant impact on the rate at which clients and counselors could fully and successfully forgive a person for a severe injustice. It was also noted that the significant effect size of the process-based individual counseling indicates the value of their continued utilization, especially with the specific groups of clients already examined. The findings suggested that the results include crucial evidence meriting a reasonable examination, even though the researchers were required to exercise caution. The findings imply that forgiveness counseling supplements the applications for the professional counseling community.