Self-Help Books and the Search for a Spiritual Authority

This topic submitted by Michelle Flood, Michael Litchfield ( floodmn@muohio.edu ) on 2/16/06. [ Human Nature Team: Michelle Flood, Michael Litchfield-Section: Blaisdell/Feister]

Introduction

In human nature, spiritual authority figures have long been a universal concept that have tremendous influence on the lives of all humans. In the modern world, some may find that in self-help books. Our research question pertains to human nature by way of how humans seek a spiritual authority figure. 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 can't find it by conventional means. We made our research project interdisciplinary by pulling from different disciplines such as, biological, gender studies, racial studies, religion, and psychology which offer different lenses for people to view our research. Through this research, we're also hoping to find out if social pressures influence the desire to seek guidance from self-help books and if these influences affect men and women differently.
Our research closely connects with the human nature course through the "Religious" section as well as the "In Search of Human Nature" 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. "Self-Help Books: Why Americans Keep Reading Them" 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. "Self-Help, Inc." 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 "rather 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." (www.selfhelpinc.com/book.html) This book takes an alternative stand than does Sandra Dolby's book "Self-Help books:É" and has allowed our experiment to view our research in a different light.

3. Starker, Steven. "Oracle at the Supermarket: The American Preoccupation With
Self-Help Books." 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 book's 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. "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People." 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. "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," has helped millions and has helped us understand self-help psychology.

5. Byrd, E. Keith et al. "A listing of biblical references to healing that may be
useful as bibliotherapy to the empowerment of rehabilitation clients."
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 than bibliotherapy does truly work for people.

6. Sullivan, Amie K et al. "Bibliotherapy in the classroom" 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. "A feminist analysis of self-help bestsellers
for improving relationships: a decade review" 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. "Recommended books for helping children deal with separation
and divorce." 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 "Bilblotherapy in the classroom" 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 wouldn't gender affect how self-help books connect with those who read them.

9. Tiede, Tom "Self-Help Nation" 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. "African Americans and Self-Help Education" 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. "Understandings Between You And Me" 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. "The Best Self-Help and Self-Awareness Books"
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.

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 cd's 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/

"A 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!" (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 like age, year, race, and major 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:
18-19 20-21 22-23 24+

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

3. Major Department

4. Greek non-greek
Major Department

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

6. Religion
Protestant
Catholic
Christian(non-denominational)
Hindu
Buddhist
Baptist
Atheist
Other (List ______________)
None

6. Have you ever read a self-help book before? Yes No

7. If yes, how often do you read them?

Frequently Sometimes Not very much

8. If you read them sometimes or frequently, do you read them because they give a sense of spiritual guidance? Yes No Not sure

9. If you do read them sometimes or frequently, do you actually follow the instructions that the books contain? Yes No Sometimes

10. If you don't or are not able to follow the instructions, why not?
Too busy Don't agree with it Doesn't work or help Other ____________
(fill in if other)

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 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.

Our Self-Help Test:

---Take a walk once a day or meditate for 15 min
---Set aside one hour a day to do a leisurely activity
---Exercise twice a week
---Have a conversation with someone new (or someone you don't know that well) at least a couple of times a week
---Write 3 things you like about yourself on a small sheet of paper and carry that with you throughout the day.

A week later, a follow-up will be done to see if they continue these activities. For some people, it might be easy to commit to a routine in a predetermined period of time but will they continue a routine even when they don't have to? This goes along with how most people want to lose weight at the beginning of the year after eating big holiday meals and making New Year's resolutions to lose weightÉbut most people quit working out soon after the resolution was made.

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 the five steps helped you?

Materials and Methods

We will be using a video camera for the interviews and paper and pencils to give out to people for the surveys and the self-help experiment. We will take turns submitting surveys and both of us will interview a select number of participants, one videotaping and the other conducting the interview.

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