Richards

The Impact of Process Groups on Community: A Survey of Perceived Cohesion and Implications for Church Communities

Jessica Richards

Abstract

This study serves as a preliminary study for assessing the effects of process groups within the church. Because little to no research has been done on the efficacy of process groups, permissions to perform the study within a church could not be obtained. Thus, the present study begins to fill this gap in the research. It examines the effects of process groups on perceived cohesion and sense of community within the larger educational community at a Christian graduate university, with the hypotheses that participation in a process group will increase (1) perceived cohesion and (2) sense of community within the larger educational community as compared to a control group. Study participants are comprised of test group students, who participated in process groups as part of a group counseling class, and a control group of students, who had not yet taken the group counseling course. In this study, process group participants completed measures of perceived cohesion and sense of community before and after participating in the process groups, and control group participants complete the measure twice in an eight week period without participation in a process group. The change in means is calculated for each group and compared using an Independent Samples T-test. No significant difference between the results for the process group and control group are found; however, based on the limitation of this study, further research in this area is suggested.

Keywords: process groups, churches, communities, cohesion