Why Is It Important To Measure Worldviews

Clinical Relevance of Measuring Worldviews

Modern and postmodern worldviews have significant implications in the field of mental health. There are four primary reasons why the (Post)modern Worldview Scale is clinically relevant. First, there is a necessity to study the implications of postmodern worldviews on a broad scale. While modernism has had adequate time to show its manifestations in society and within individuals, postmodernism has not. Therefore, the long term effects of widespread embodiment of a postmodern worldview is largely unknown. It is understood that worldviews affect cognition and behavior (Koltko-Rivera, 2004; Kraft, 1999). With that being said, it is reasonable to expect that postmodern worldviews will manifest differently

In order to know when a client has differing worldviews from a mental health professional, the mental health professional must first know his or her own worldviews. Without knowing where a client differs from the mental health professional, the client’s worldviews cannot be adequately identified and used to facilitate treatment. Also, the risk of ignoring or opposing a client’s worldviews, in this case, can compromise building a therapeutic alliance that facilitates patient satisfaction, treatment compliance, as well as positive treatment outcomes (Leach, 2005). Furthermore, mental health professionals need to identify their own worldviews so that their personal biases are understood. Needless to say, understanding one’s own biases are imperative to delivering effective

The Likert scale indicates agreement on a scale of 1, strongly disagree, to 5, strongly agree. The vignettes prompt the respondent to indicate their level of agreeability to the proposed answer to the vignettes question. Each vignette seeks to contrast worldviews on one of four fronts; metaphysics, epistemology, human nature, or ethics. The degree of agreeability on the Likert scale then indicates the level of agreement with a worldview that is either postmodern or modern. There are five questions for each of the four dimensions of postmodernism and modernism. Overall, there are twenty items. By using five items for each of the four dimensions, it will be clear if a client endorses postmodern or modern worldviews in terms of metaphysics, epistemology, human nature, and ethics. Also, by starting out with five questions each, it is possible to remove items that are not needed after further statistical analyses have been