The research will evaluate and refine a previously published cultural model of therapeutic process in ritual healing among Catholic Pentecostals in the United States. As an increasingly common and influential form of health-seeking behavior, religious healing has become a factor relevant to the practice of professional medicine, and hence its ramifications extend to the entire health care system. Yet there have been very few systematic studies by means of which this widespread appeal could be assessed. This is especially important from the standpoint of mental health where, with significant government support, the past decade has witnessed efforts to generate a knowledge base on the uses and misuses of therapies. In Phase I of the research, interviews will be conducted with 30 religous healers in the Catholic Pentecostal movement, and the researcher will observe healer training sessions and group healing sessions. The results from this phase will be presented as a descriptive ethnography, and will serve as background data for Phase II. In Phase II, six of the original 30 healers will be chosen to work closely with the researcher in documenting therapeutic process in healing. The researcher will record healing sessions conducted by these healers, and conduct followup interviews with healers and patients. Patient interviews will include open-ended ethnographic inteviews, interpersonal process recall interviews focused on the actual healing session, and administration of the Hopkins symptom Checklist (SCL-90), a standardized measure of psychological distress. The proposal establishes criteria for assessing whether the key rhetorical tasks positied by the model (predisposition, empowerment, and transformation) are achieved in actual episodes of healing. Analyses will be carried out using a combination of ethnological methods, and methods drawn from psychotherapy process research. The research locale will be defined by the boundaries of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, Massachusetts.
