Persoonlikheid as voorspeller van doeltreffende portuurhulpverlening

Many children experience emotional problems and seek help for these problems from their friends rather than from professional people or their parents. This process, where people help their peers of the same age, social status and background, is called peer helping. The peer helping movement was developed in an attempt to structure this informal spontaneous process in order to make the process of peers helping their peers more effective. This was done by selecting peer helpers at the hand of certain criteria and training them formally in the process of helping others. The purpose of this study was two-fold. The first objective was to determine whether the HSPQ could be used to select peer helpers and the second objective was to determine whether the HSPQ could be used to predict the effectiveness of selected peer helpers. The study sample consisted if a group of volunteers (n = 19) from a local high school. These volunteers were subject to a selection process and were then trained as peer helpers. The results demonstrated that the HSPQ could be used to speed up the selection process and a regression equation to be used in the selection of peer helpers was developed. Effective peer helpers were shown to possess the following characteristics: they were emotionally stable, able to handle frustrations, self-assured, ambitious and disciplined, while not being overly self-assertive or depressed. It is recommended that research into aspects of peer helping is continued in order to promote the knowledge about peer helping. In this way peer helping could be structured and made more effective and more available to children in need of emotional help.