Changes in World View
Self-help groups, including DA, urge members to change their world view. It is critically important for self-help groups to ease this process for their members as changes in world view are generally accompanied by significant behavioral changes. For example, the pamphlet Debtors Anonymous answers "How Does a Person Get Solvent Through the D.A. Program?" by explaining that DA brings about a "progressive personality change" within the member. This change is accomplished through faith in, and understanding of, DA's Twelve Steps.
Using convenience and snowball sampling sociologist Terrell A. Hayes found and surveyed 46 DA members from July 1993 to June 1995. 42 of the members surveyed were attending meetings in the Eastern United States, the remaining four attended meetings in Austin, Texas. An analysis of the data Hayes collected revealed specific parts of DA hindered acceptance of DA's overall ideology. These included: labeling, intergroup and intragroup differences, lack of a clear position on bankruptcy and debt-shifting and contradictory information on what literature DA groups should use.
Read more about this topic: Debtors Anonymous
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or view:
“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied ... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist—the only thing he’s good for—is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. Even if it’s only his view of a meaning. That’s what he’s for—to give his view of life.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)