ACPE Research Network

The ACPE Research Network seeks to foster connections among members of the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education interested in research, encourage original research, and raise awareness about published research (e.g., in the health care literature and the education literature) related to spirituality, pastoral care, and Clinical Pastoral Education.

GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS (updated January 17, 2012):

RECENT:

Call for Proposals: Growing the Field of Chaplaincy Research in Palliative Care -- Application deadline March 15, 2012, with decisions announced May 31, 2012; and projects to begin July 1, 2012 and be completed within 18 months. Approximately 6-10 grants will be awarded through HealthCare Chaplaincy, ranging up to $250,000, made possible by the John Templeton Foundation. Projects should develop and explore hypotheses about chaplains’ contributions to palliative care; should team experienced health, behavioral and social scientists with chaplains to develop their research skills by becoming active participants in the research enterprise; and should involve aspiring chaplain-researchers whose projects are not selected for funding through the competitive RFP process, but who, nonetheless, show considerable promise as researchers. Applications will be accepted from interdisciplinary research teams comprised of health, behavioral or social scientists, and board-certified chaplains who are affiliated with educational or health care institutions, research organizations, or other types of nonprofit organizations (or consortia) located in the United States or Canada. For more information, see www.healthcarechaplaincy.org/templeton-research-project.html

George Fitchett (Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, IL) and colleagues are interested in learning more about the curricula of ACPE-accredited centers that include teaching about research in the residency programs. If you include such teaching in your program please e-mail him at george_fitchett@rush.edu or call 312-563-4801.

Two major reviews of chaplaincy research are featured as our January & February Articles-of-the-Month: "Testing the efficacy of chaplaincy care" and "A methodological analysis of chaplaincy research: 2000-2009." These significant contributions to the literature should be essential reading for any chaplain involved with research or interested in the state of empirical studies about our profession.

The Fall 2011 Newsletter includes information about workshops and our annual meeting at the national ACPE conference in February 2012, an update in the IIP project, and a note of four recent overviews and evaluations of measures of spirituality, which give a picture of a good menu of instrument options for research. Also, note that the Summer Newsletter includes a call for collaboration on research on the impact of clinical pastoral education on clergy health, a request for materials to help with research into chaplains' documentation, and an update on "Spiritual Skills" research.

An updated Bibliography on Spirituality and Alzheimer's/Dementia has been added to the June 2007 Article-of-the-Month.

The Knowledge Base of Samples from the Ideal Intervention Paper (IIP) Project has been updated (December 5, 2011) and now contains 252 summaries of Ideal Intervention Paper reports in 24 categories.

Using Safari Reader: Our website is designed very simply and cleanly to allow for quick downloads and flexible viewing on all Internet devices. But if you use Safari as a browser, the Reader option, which appears in the address box, may be used for our Articles-of-the-Month and Newsletter pages to offer even greater ease of reading. Reader works especially well on an iPhone or iPad.

CONTINUING:

The latest annotated bibliography of Medline-indexed articles on spirituality & health, from the Pastoral Care Department at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, is available as a searchable PDF via www.uphs.upenn.edu/pastoral/resed/bibindex.html. The bibliography for articles published during 2010 includes 321 entries.

HealthCare Chaplaincy (New York) has posted on its website (www.healthcarechaplaincy.org) the first five bibliographies in its Practical Bearings series --critical reviews of important books, articles and other publications on the theory and practice of pastoral care. "The Management of Care: Literature on Leadership and Organizational Development," "Discerning Patient Needs: Spiritual Assessment," "Meeting the Other: Interreligious Encounters in the Provision and Supervision of Spiritual Care," "To Want to Learn: Educational Theory for Supervision and Training," and "By Its Fruits: The Science of Health Care Chaplaincy," can be downloaded via www.healthcarechaplaincy.org/chaplaincy-research-resources/practical-bearings.html. Future issues planned for the coming months include: "Ministry Amidst Chance, Necessity, Love: Cancer and Health Care Chaplaincy," and "The Comfort of Strangers: Trends in the History and Current Practice of Health Care." Rev. Dr. Leonard Hummel, Professor of Pastoral Theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, and Visiting Scholar with HealthCare Chaplaincy, spoke about these bibliographies at our October 2008 Network meeting; and he is quoted on the project website: "Practical Bearings will point professional chaplains to resources that will help them fulfill their mission in the evolving and complex world of health care." These bibliographies are not restricted to research materials, but they should be broadly valuable.

The Journal of Health Care Chaplaincy is soliciting original research papers and literature reviews on topics of interest to chaplaincy. Full-length reports and brief reports of research may be submitted. All manuscripts should be in APA style and will be peer-reviewed. Please send manuscripts to KFlannelly@healthcarechaplaincy.org. For more on the journal, see our Spring-Summer 2009 Newsletter (§6).

The Fetzer Institute (www.fetzer.org) has revised its website, and the link for its Multidimensional Measurement of Religiousness/Spirituality for Use in Health Care Research has been changed (to www.fetzer.org/images/stories/pdf/MultidimensionalBooklet.pdf). Note that the new online PDF does not contain the cover, title page, preface, and table of contents, which includes the booklet's statement that the publication "may be used and reprinted without special permission." All links on our Network pages have been changed to reflect this new address. See especially the Articles-of-the-Month for January 2004, January 2009, and April 2003.

Internet addresses often change, and one of the challenges of maintaining a site like ours is to keep all of the links on our many pages updated. Members, please e-mail john.ehman@uphs.upenn.edu if you encounter difficulties with linked sites.

If you are a first-time visitor, please also note:

This web site became operational on September 1, 2002. It will continue to evolve in response to suggestions from Network members. To submit suggestions, please directly e-mail the Network's convener at john.ehman@uphs.upenn.edu. All member correspondence is confirmed by return e-mail.

For the web site of the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, click here.