Guidance from Spiritual Authority vs. Self-Help Books

This topic submitted by Michael Litchfield and Michelle Flood ( litchfmr@muohio.edu ) on 4/27/06. [ Human Nature Team: Michael Litchfield and Michelle Flood-Section: Blaisdell/Feister]

Michelle Flood
Mike Litchfield

Introduction

In human culture, spiritual authority figures have long been universal influences on the lives of human beings. In this ever-changing world, the search for this spiritual authority figure can be hard to find. Some turn to Religion to find their authority while others are constantly searching for guidance in other places. Many studies have been done regarding the human need for spiritual authority but seldom, it seems, have these studies looked for other ways that humans can find this spiritual guidance. One place that people find spiritual authority is in the growing field of bibliotherapy.
ÒThe idea of pursuing a calling Ð of having a central purpose in life Ð remains fundamental to the American culture of self-improvementÓ (Self Help, inc., pg 25). This quote itself explains how self-help books came to into being. The idea of a spiritual authority is truly ideal. To have someone/something to turn to in a time of need, having set moral values, and having a meaning for life are all things that this authority brings and something that all people want. The creation of self-help books was originally designed to give people a cheap and confidential way to understand their feelings and problems. The name bibliotherapy shows how these books were used in much the same manner as human therapists. Since the need for spiritual authority is so great in human culture many, to fill this need, have turned to self-help books as a helpful way to confidentially find this spiritual guidance.
According to Samuel Smiles, the first known author of self-help books, Òthe spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individualÓ (Self-Help). Smiles believed in the values of self-help so much that he decided to stop writing about parliamentary and other structural reforms to concentrate on self improvement as a means of social advance (Samuel Smiles; Wikipedia). National progress could only truly be accomplished if the individuals within the society feel that they can help themselves. Only then can they feel empowered enough to help others which in turn will help society. It all starts with the individual. Laws can always restrict people from doing wrongful acts but laws can never fully encourage positive actions from each individual.
Our hypothesis is that humans will try to find this authority figure in order to feel complete and focused. We believe through our research project, we will find that this authority figure comes in many ways and self-help books fill a void for some who canÕt find it by conventional means. We made our research project interdisciplinary by pulling from different disciplines such as, biological, racial studies, religion, and psychology, which offer different lenses for people to view our research. Through this research, weÕre also hoping to find out what humans do turn to for spiritual guidance if it is not self-help books.
Our research closely connects with the human nature course through the ÒReligiousÓ section as well as the ÒIn Search of Human NatureÓ section. These are important concepts of human nature that we have and will cover in the course which will allow our classmates to have a better and closer connection to our research question.

Relevance of your Research Question:

Literature Review:

1. Dolby, Sandra K. ÒSelf-Help Books: Why Americans Keep Reading ThemÓ University of Illinois Press, 2005.

This book is one of the most influential materials that we have and will use for our project because of the fact that not only is it very recently published, but the topic of the whole book closely parallels our research topic. This book looks at why Americans are one of the biggest buyers of these self-help books and what factors attract these certain types of people to these books. We are able to use this book as insight into what makes these books so motivational. Also this book contains an extensive section on spirituality, which seems to be one of the hardest parts to research for our project.

2. McGee, Micki. ÒSelf-Help, Inc.Ó Oxford Univerity Press, 2005.

Self-Help, Inc was a great choice in books to help with our research because of the fact that the book has a website that is constantly being updated so the facts are up to date. The summary for this book is perfectly worded on the website when it states Òrather than finding that Americans are "narcissistic" or self-involved, as others have claimed, McGee shows that Americans have been relying on self-help culture for advice on how to cope in an increasingly volatile and competitive labor market. For Americans today, working on themselves has become a central requirement of their professional lives.Ó (www.selfhelpinc.com/book.html) This book takes an alternative stand than does Sandra DolbyÕs book ÒSelf-Help books:ÉÓ and has allowed our experiment to view our research in a different light.

3. Starker, Steven. ÒOracle at the Supermarket: The American Preoccupation With Self- Help Books.Ó Transaction Publishers, 1989.

The chapters that we have used for our research are some of the best literature we could find about the spirituality aspect of project. Even though this book is a little old in comparison to our other references, it gives great insight into the early obsession of self-help books. Since we want to see how self-help books act as a either a substitution or an addition to ones spirituality, this bookÕs research on the topic has and will continue to help us mold our thesis for our project into a new and useful tool when looking at the nature of human beings.

4. Covey, Stephen R. ÒThe Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.Ó Simon and Schuster, 1989.

Most of the books and articles we found that revolved around the topic of self-help books did more than mention this self-help book as one of the most influential and one of the first big sellers in the ever-growing industry. This book helped us understand what exactly goes into a self-help book. In order to create a project that will help others understand how self-help books are so motiviating and influential, we had to look closely at one of the more influential books in bibliotherapy. ÒThe Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,Ó has helped millions and has helped us understand self-help psychology.

5. Byrd, E. Keith et al. ÒA listing of biblical references to healing that may be useful as bibliotherapy to the empowerment of rehabilitation clients.Ó Journal of Rehabilitation, July Ð Sept. 1993.

This article was the first experiment that we found that tested much of what we wanted to test. The experiment involved trying to understand if hearing specific biblical passages that involved instances of healing in the bible could increase the effectiveness of rehabilitation in a hospital setting. Bibliotherapy, in this experiment, mostly improved the healing process by a significant number. The most interesting part of the experiment is which chapters of the bible affected the patients the most; this showed us and others that bibliotherapy does truly work for people.

6. Sullivan, Amie K et al. ÒBibliotherapy in the classroomÓ Childhood Education, Winter 2002/2003

This article both describes how self-help books are being used to help youth and the origins of bibliotherapy. This article showed how self-help books are being used in early education to help teachers with kids emotional problems, study habits, classroom manners, etc. Combining a detailed history of self-help books and their use in the classroom setting with actual research of how this method works in real situations. Although age is not a major consideration in our project, it is a very interesting topic for discussion as well as an interesting research idea to help base our ideas on.

7. Zimmerman, Toni Shindler et al. ÒA feminist analysis of self-help bestsellers for improving relationships: a decade reviewÓ Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, April 2001

Although this article looks at self-help books in a feminist light, it still offers some great information on how self-help books help people in general. In our study, we would like to look at gender differences within our chosen topic, so since this article focuses particularly on how feminist women view the top 11 relationship books on the New York Times bestseller list over the past decade, it will help us determine whether or not gender has anything to do with self-help books and religion.

8. Pardeck, John T. ÒRecommended books for helping children deal with separation and divorce.Ó Adolescence, Spring, 1996

This article deals with how ages of children affects how they are affected by divorce, age also affects which books they should read to better connect with the problems they are going through. This information, along with ÒBilblotherapy in the classroomÓ helped open our eyes to the idea of age when researching self-help books. Self-help books are created with different audiences in mind, which was an important lesson taken from this article. Different stresses in life cause different people of different genders and age to act differently. For example, this article points out that most children, but especially boys, experience academic problems following a parents divorce. This not only allowed us to see what kinds of problems self-help books address, but that gender does play a role in how people deal with their problems, so why wouldnÕt gender affect how self-help books connect with those who read them.

9. Tiede, Tom ÒSelf-Help NationÓ Atlantic Monthly Press 2001

This book is partly one mans story about how over his many years of owning a bookstore, he was always interested in the wide variety of people who were completely hooked by self-help books and partly about his research about what he felt were the most interesting and motivational portions of many of the self-help books he sold over the years.

10. Rowland, Michael L. ÒAfrican Americans and Self-Help EducationÓ Eric Digest no.
222 (2000)

In this journal article, information was given about a specific demographic group rarely discussed in scholarly works concerning self-help books. According to the article, African-Americans do not benefit from typical self-help books and therefore do not read them as much because most self-help books focus on the self as an individual whereas culturally, African-Americans value the self as a part of a community. For our project, we will keep this in mind when observing results from the surveys, interviews, and the experiment from the African-American participants.

11. Tucker-Ladd, Clayton E. ÒUnderstandings Between You And MeÓ Psychological Self-Help, 1996

In this journal article, answers to most frequently asked questions were stated. One important answer was that yes, most self-help books are really vague and are written for purposes other than trying to give suffering people genuine help that is approved by professionals but they are still really popular because it is much more affordable than a therapist. On the other hand, research shows that self-help books are just as beneficial for most people as a therapist would be but only for minor problems. For major problems, seeing a therapist that will be able to check your progress every week is still preferred. For our project, we will be asking people what they think about self-help books and see if it compares to these findings.

12. Fried, Stephen B. Ph.D. ÒThe Best Self-Help and Self-Awareness BooksÓ American Library Association, 1995

This book is similar to many of the websites in their nature of wanting to help people find the exact right self-help book to fit their needs. Although this book is fairly old, it allowed us to search for several different topics at the same time instead of having a search engine look it up for us. In order for us to be able to understand the motivating nature of self-help books, we must first understand what topics these self-help books are geared toward and also the topics that are similar to them.

13. Clark, Mary. ÒIn Search Of Human NatureÓ Routledge, 2002/2005.

This book allowed us to look at how our results connect with the overall study of human nature. ClarkÕs writing allowed us to retain some great information of feelings and emotions that we were able to connect with our aspects of spirituality.

Website Review:

1. Internet, Accessed February 10th. http://www.selfgrowth.com/

This website allows its users to be able to locate the specific literature that they should use in order to best fit their individual needs. Users are able to do this using a search engine provided by the site. This website helps us to understand what types of self-help books should be used in certain instances. Knowing this will help us determine the most motivational portions of self-help books for different types of people.

2. Internet, Accessed February 10th. http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110007372

This website is just a commentary from the wall street journal, but it can provide useful information to all who seek knowledge about the new innovations in bibliotherapy. The article is based on a self-help giant named Dr. Peck. His books focus on religion and psychology, which are two major components of our project. When reading this article, those in search of religious help will be able to better understand what to look for when searching for the right self-help book.

3. Internet, Accessed February 12th. http://www.hypnosisaudio.com/

This website not only deals with the sales of self-help books, but also hypnosis and relaxation tapes, which are loosely tied to our research topic. Even though this websites main purpose is to sell these books and tapes, it helps us to look at the religion aspect of our project by searching what the best books would be for those in need of a spiritual authority. Another interesting feature about this website is that instead of having to borrow self-help books from the library, this site offers mp3 files to sample in order to get a better feeling about how the cdÕs and tapes will work.

4. Internet, Accessed February 11th. http://www.onlineconsulting.com/book1.html

This website has one of the most interesting and accessible items that we were able to find on the internet. This item is its free motivational newsletter that is emailed right to your computer from the site every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday every week. The rest of the site is filled with loads of self-help articles from major names in bibliotherapy as well as places to buy these books.

5. Internet, Accessed February 14th. http://cornerstone.wwwhubs.com/

ÒA non-profit site dedicated to providing free access to some of the very best inspirational/self-improvement books ever written. Featuring the full texts of over 100 complete books available to read free online!Ó (http://cornerstone.wwwhubs.com/) This website keeps the trend of self-help book websites wanting to help people find the best books to buy. The new and different feature about this site is that it contains a message board as well as a webring where we can look at how people talk to other people about their problems finding the best self-help books.

Interdisciplinary Approach (Including cultural, social and scientific perspectives)

When looking just at how self-help books connect with people, by helping motivate, accelerate, and better their lives, the topic only involves a single discipline and therefore only allows for one way of looking at the issue of how self-help books can be used to look at the nature of human beings. When adding the idea of spirituality and how gender affects how self-help books are used and/or viewed, many more disciplines are used therefore allowing the project to take on an interdisciplinary focus. The main disciplines we are using for our project include psychology, religion, gender studies, racial studies, and biological studies. The interdisciplinary focus is important to include because when looking at a large topic such as the nature of human beings, the more lenses that can be used to look at the topic, the more detailed the arguments that the project wants to get across can be. These four disciplines allow this project to become more accessible to its viewers by connecting with the readers and participants on multiple levels therefore allowing the project to interest people across many fields.

Research Design

One method that we will use is a survey. In the survey, we will ask simple questions to Miami University students like age, year, and race so that we have an idea of who is saying what and will be used for our demographical statistics. Secondly, we will ask questions regarding their preferences and usability to self-help books.

Sample Survey:

1. Age:

2. What year are you?
Freshmen Sophomore Junior Senior Graduate

3. Race:
Caucasian/White
African American/Black
Native American
Hispanic/Latino
Asian/Pacific Islander
Middle Easterner

4. Religion
Protestant
If Protestant, what denomination? (Baptist, non-denom., etc.) _______________
Catholic
Hindu
Buddhist
Atheist
Other (List ______________)
None

5. How religious do you believe you are on a scale from 1-6 ?

1 2 3 4 5 6
Not religious Very religious

6. How often do you attend religious services?

Never Only on Less than once Once a Once a More than once
holidays month month week week

7. How often do you pray?

Never Only in times Less than once Once a Once a More than once
of stress/need month month week week

8. Where do you receive your spiritual guidance from?
pastor/priest
parents
counselors/teachers
friends/peers
other adults
scriptures
television
books and literature
Nowhere

9. Have you ever read these self-help book before
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus: Yes No
How to survive at College: Yes No
Chicken Soup for the Soul: Yes No
ÉÉ. for Dummies: Yes No (Which? ___________)
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Yes No
Other: (__________________) Yes No

10. If you answered yes to any, how often do you read them?

Frequently Sometimes Not very much

11. If you read them sometimes or frequently, do you read them because they give you something to turn to in a time of need (much like a spiritual guidance)? Yes No Not sure

12. If you read them sometimes or frequently, do you seek help in them in a time of crisis?
Yes No Sometimes

13. What other reasons did you read self-help books?

14. If you read self-help books, do you they replace spiritual guidance (like from a priest) for you? Or do you still receive spiritual guidance along with the self-help books?

Yes, Self-Help books replace my spiritual guidance

No, I receive guidance from Self-Help books as well as spiritual leaders

The interviews will go more in depth with these same questions from the survey, just so we can have a bigger picture than the yeses and nos that we will receive from the surveys.
Along with surveys and interviews, we will also perform a more quantitative and creative task to test how effective self-help books really are. Although surveys and interviews are very useful in determining the answer, we would also like to see more concrete results with our peers as participants. For example, in a survey, a person might say that self-help books really work for them but do they actually follow it? This experiment will help us to understand if this does occur and what the reasoning would be behind their choices.

This is our abbreviated version of a self-help book. Compliant volunteers from our class will have to try their best to follow this routine for two weeks. Remember, not everyone is perfect, if they do not accomplish every task in this routine every day, we want to know why. Reasons like: I was too busy, too tired, etc. will be useful in determining why some people in general do not believe in self-help books. All of their journal entries will allow us to test our hypothesis to see if it is valid.

Our Self-Help Guide:

-Every other day, take about fifteen minutes to half an hour to free write about the qualities that you have seen recently that are inspirational to you.

-Take a walk once a day or meditate for 15 minutes to clear your mind of the dayÕs stress.

-Keep a piece of paper with you and take time to frequently look at it that contains the words:
-Strength
-Courage
-Perseverance
-Determination
-Power
-Respect
-Smile
-Laugh

A week later, a follow-up will be done to see if they continue these activities and if so, did they have more direction in their life due to the guidance of this mini version of a self help book.

Our Follow-up Questions:

Participants will write a couple of sentences responding to these questions:
---Are they still doing it? Which if any, are you still doing?
---In what ways have these steps helped you?
---Do you think self-help tests like these are right for you or would you rather follow a traditional religious way of life or neither?

Materials and Methods

Are Materials were limited during the study of humans constant strive to seek a spiritual authority. Our surveys, which were handed out to 43 students around campus, were our main source of data for this project. We constantly compared our data, taken from our surveys, to some of the data found in the books and articles we had read to prepare for this project. Many resources have listed results from their research of people and their usage of self-help books but theyÕve only surveyed, or tested in some other way, adults or small children. Not only do we want to test a unique age group, we also want to showcase results from our peers so that people from Miami can learn more about themselves and each other at least with this area of study. The only other form of data we collected was in the form of our created self-help guide that we handed to members of our immediate class to follow for two weeks. Here we were hoping to collect data on how self-help books truly affect their readers by having our participants keep journals of when and why they followed or did not follow our guide.
Once all our surveys were completed and our participants had turned in our self-help guide, we were ready to start compiling our data. We used both the Jmp program that can be found in the Tappan computer center in Peabody Hall as well as Microsoft Excel to help us place our data into meaningful graphs. We used the Jmp program for only one section of our data. Here we compared the different races that we tested with their different responses to our religious scale question. Even though this was not a main focus of our project, we wanted to see if there was any significant difference between the races to make sure that we hadnÕt stumbled across any interesting findings that we hadnÕt considered when starting the project. The rest of our data was compiled using Microsoft Excel. Here we made graphs to allow for a better understand of our data. The overall percentage that each answer was circled was calculated for our religious scale, attendance of religious services, amount of prayer, where our participants found their spiritual guidance, and for how many people that we tested had actually read any sort of self-help book.
We used these methods so that our research could flow smoothly as well as allowing for our data to be as comprehensive as possible. For the last part of our project we presented our research to our human nature class using Microsoft Power Point. Here we included our data from both the Jmp program and Microsoft Excel so that our fellow students could understand our data visually.

Results

As stated before 43 students from across the Miami University campus participated in our surveys. This is where we received the bulk of our information. The graph below shows our only use of the Jmp program. Here we compared the different races and their answers to our question about how religious you think you are.

This graph showed that there were no significant differences between the four different races that participated in our survey. We were able to visually see how each race answered our religious scale question, but not much information was used from this. To bounce off of the graph above, we used Microsoft Excel to create a graph to show the percentage of people that circled each number one through six. This graph can be viewed below.

This graph was useful in determining the basic religiosity of our test subjects. We received this data by taking the number of students that circled each number and dividing that number by the total number of students. We did this for the next two graphs which show the answers to the questions ÒHow often do you attend religious servicesÓ and ÒHow often do you prayÓ respectively.

The last graph we made from our results showed the percentages of the circled answers, but this time the students could chose more than one answer for each. This portion of our study was one of the most revealing in terms of interesting findings.

The data found that is not contained in the above graphs was for the most part irrelevant because it in no way supported our hypothesis. The only other part of our survey that is useful is the amount of students that we surveyed that actually had read some sort of self-help book. 63% of our participants stated that they had actually read a self-help book. Some of the reasons that students had read these self-help books were ÒCuriosity and other means by which to better myselfÓ, ÒTo better understand myselfÓ, ÒIn order to gain professional/enlightened perspectives about approaches to living happilyÓ, and ÒInteresting to feel you are Ônot aloneÕ in what you are going through.Ó These comments were interesting and some certainly coincided with our project. Spiritual guidance is for some, a way in which to live ones life. The reasons our participants provided for reading self-help books showed that some of them looked to self-help books to better their life.
The last part of our data came from our creative portion of our project, our own self-help guide. The results from this were limited because of the fact that only one person actually completed the guide. The results found from that were that this participant mostly used the Òstrength wordsÓ in times of increased stress. This also fit well with our project and showed us that self-help books can truly be used in ways that help certain people live ÒgoodÓ lives.

Discussion

Our data shows that we failed to reject the null hypothesis of humanÕs constant search for an authority figure in order to feel complete and focused. This was found using the college student age population, represented by randomly selected students at Miami University. At first this information was very disconcerting, but interesting questions came about because of this. Because not enough information was attained to support the hypothesis, it drew our attention to parts of the experiment that might have been overlooked if the results had come out differently.
The question on our survey dealing with the place in which our participants look for their spiritual guidance proved to bring about the most interesting results. Our results proved our assumptions wrong when parents and friends/peers were the top picked answers instead of pastors/priests and scripture. We were completely surprised to find out that parents were the second most picked answer. We believed that at this point in our participantsÕ lives, since they were all college students, they might be more reluctant to follow what their parents say. Another interesting fact that we found was that the third most picked answer was books/literature. Even though 14% of our participants chose this answer, we were not able to find a single person who followed a specific self-help book for their spiritual guidance.
Researching and then carrying out this project taught us more about human nature than we bargained for. We set out to show how the search for spiritual guidance is so strong that some people turn to self-help books if they arenÕt able to find this authority by conventional means. Instead we uncovered many questions about how this spiritual authority truly affects human nature. These questions mostly came about because of our self-help guide. Even though we had little participation, our studies showed that our participant did indeed have a more positive outlook on the days where she looked at her ÒstrengthÓ words frequently. Do spiritual authorities provide feelings of optimism? Is that why humans are constantly searching for a spiritual guidance? Although we were not able to answer these questions through our research, we were able to ponder the answers. Surely these would be an interesting question for further research to look into.
If we decided to do this project again in the future, a few things should be changed so that our results could be more definitive. ItÕs a fact that Miami University lacks diversity, so therefore our subjects were mostly Caucasian. Even though our data found that there was no significant difference between the answers chosen in the religious scale vs. race, a more diverse subject population could prove otherwise. If this more diverse population could have been attained, more conclusions could have been made. Some questions would consider whether a certain religion is more important to a particular culture in general or whether a particular culture choose not to read self-help books simply because they could not relate to most of them (i.e. RowlandÕs article, ÒAfrican Americans and Self Help Education,Ó discusses how African Americans donÕt read self-help books, which focus on the self as an individual typically, because they generally value community).
Another factor that could have been helpful would have been a much larger group of participants for both our survey and for our self-help guide. If we would have had even ten people actually fill out our self-help guide, more information on how self-help books actually work could have been attained. Since our self-help guide is the creative aspect of our project, even though our research on this particular project is over, our guide can carry on into the future so that more people can live a more optimistic life by using it. This would have also helped us to understand how peopleÕs feelings and emotions are affected when self-help books are used.
A better understanding of how the first self-help books worked and why they were created would have also been a great help for creating this project. Because of the limited time that could be spent on this project, this wasnÕt possible. To make this project more detailed, it would be best to read a couple of self-help books so that the experimenters would have a better understanding of how they affect the feelings and emotions of their participants.

Conclusion

Before research was started for this project, we were truly skeptical about how our project would explain this very interesting part of human nature. We were not sure if we were going to be able to show how humans look at religion and spiritual authorities and even though we failed to reject the null hypothesis, much information that is worth contemplating was found. These findings go along with Mary ClarkÕs viewpoint on feelings. ÒOur psychic needs, and the feelings that accompany them, that are at the root of human nature. They have been the keys to our survival. Our much touted intelligence evolved, at least in part, to service these more elemental, survival-determining aspects of ourselvesÓ (Clark, pg 138). Even though our project was designed to focus on spiritual guidance, more information on spirituality was gained instead. This project has also altered our views of spirituality because of how our creative projectÑour self-help guideÑforced its readers to keep in ÒtuneÓ to their inner feelings. The ÒstrengthÓ words allowed for the users of our self-help guide to keep their feelings positive and therefore have a ÒbetterÓ day. For us, this was the most interesting and informative part of our project.
We still believe that it is in our human nature to constantly search for a spiritual authority to help us with our feelings and emotions to be more focused people even though our results failed to show this connection. Humans are always trying to understand the meaning of things. ÒOur need for meaning is our greatest need, superseding all othersÓ (Clark, pg 50). We believe that this is true and that spiritual authority can lead to a better understanding, or meaning, of the world in which we live. ÒPeople voluntarily give up food, sex, companionship, even life itself in search of and in defense of what they value Ð what means something to themÓ (Clark, pg 50). Our project should be continued at a later date because of all the interesting and important information that we have found. This project is a great example for how people constantly search for a spiritual guidance, which, in a sense, is a constant search for the meaning of life.

Next Article
Previous Article
Return to the Topic Menu