What have we learned from research on grief counselling?
A response to Schut and Neimeyer
Keywords:
Grief counselling, bereavement support, outcomes, effectiveness, meta-analysisAbstract
AbstractDale Larson and William Hoyt respond to Robert Neimeyer and Henk Schut's articles in this issue. They argue that Neimeyer and Schut's more pessimistic conclusions about the effectiveness of bereavement counselling are drawn from large meta-analyses of many different approaches, with different populations, recruited in a range of different ways at different times following bereavement, and followed up over different periods of time. They restate their assertion that we should continue to be cautious about accepting unquestioningly such generalised findings based on broad-brush inclusion criteria as the research in fact provides more grounds for optimism than these meta-analyses suggest.
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