Ruba Research Critique on \"Empathy and Social

Ruba

Research Critique on "Empathy and social support for the terminally ill: Implications for recruiting and retaining hospice and hospital volunteers"

This particular research focuses on the relationship between empathy and social support as essential variables for the effectiveness of hospice and hospital volunteers. This paper will provide a critical summary and analysis of the research conducted by Nichole Egbert and Roxanne Parrott, proponents of this Communication Studies research. The format of this critique will first discuss the nature of each research step/method taken by the researchers, and after the summary, an analysis and critique of the paper will then be conducted.

The first part of the paper that will be studied includes the determination of the research problem, identification of related literature used in the study, and the analysis of theoretical, conceptual, and operational or hypothetical framework of the study. As was stated earlier, the research aims to determine the effectiveness of hospice and hospital volunteers by determining their levels of empathy and social support to patients. Three primary objectives of the paper emerge in relation to the questions that the paper tries to answer. The following specific objectives are enumerated as follows:

To learn more about how hospice volunteers communicate with their patients by comparing them to a group of volunteers who work in a traditional hospital setting;

To determine whether hospice volunteers are more empathic than hospital volunteers; and To determine the relationship between empathy and volunteers' reported provision of emotional and instrumental support.

The objectives enumerated can be converted into question form, thereby deriving from these objectives the research questions that need to be answered. These research goals are interconnected with each other, and cannot stand alone as a single research variable to be discussed. Objective #1 aims to do a comparative analysis between hospice and hospital volunteers; such goal will be achieved by first determining the factors or elements that set these two groups apart with each other. Thus, once these factors have been identified, objective #2 emerges, where the researchers try to determine whether hospice and hospital volunteers have differences in their management of their volunteer work and most importantly, their effectiveness in making their patients comfortable and happy. Lastly, objective #3 shows how it becomes certain in the research (through its results) that empathy and social support have significant effects in affecting volunteer performance and patient recovery and/or satisfaction.

The technical part of the paper can be found in the Methodology part of the research. In this part, it is evident that the research used the descriptive and exploratory research design, since the researchers wanted to know whether empathy and social support have indeed affective effects to patients. However, since empathy and social support are predetermined variables in the study, the research subsists to hypothesis formulation. The research's hypothesis aims to prove that empathy and social support have a positive relationship with effective volunteer performance, specifically, empathy and social support have a positive relationship with effective performance of hospice volunteers. The purpose of the research is mainly for application use, although the research will also be important for entities interested in knowing the effective methods or ways in which patient recovery and/or satisfaction is achieved. Variables used for this paper are the following: empathy and social support as independent variables, and volunteer performance and effectiveness as dependent variables. Instrumentation used for the study used scales and measures derived from studies similar in the nature of the research's topic. Since the research is quantitative and the research method used is experimental, the scales and measures used as instruments are the primary basis for analyzing the research's findings and conclusion. Examples of these measures and scales used in the research are the following: The Perspective Taking subscale, Empathic Concern subscale, Emotional Contagion subscale, Communicative Responsiveness scale, and Social Support categories, namely the instrumental support and emotional support. Units of analysis for the study are the hospice and hospital volunteers, the patients that participated in the research, and the levels of empathy and social support in each member of the two groups, as determined by the measures and scales used in the paper.