Variants of Sensitivity Training and Encounter: Diversity or Fragmentation?

Abstract

Training and encounter groups are today markedly divergent, despite a common core of values at their inception. One hundred and thirty-eight experienced group leaders' responses to a questionnaire and interaction scenarios were evaluated in terms of preferred goals, values, interventions, and demographic indicators. A combination of factor analysis and multiple discriminant analysis yielded three distinct and highly interpretable groups: those concerned with learning, remediation (therapy), or expanded experiencing. The aim of each differs-social effectiveness, personality integration, or expressiveness. Intervention strategies differ accordingly: The learning-centered (A) trainer tries to highlight group and interpersonal conflicts rather than intraor interpersonal conflicts. The remedial (B) leader's closest referent is group psychotherapy. The expanded experiencing (C) type is more diffuse in purpose, but more concrete in modeling sensory awareness and expressiveness exercises. These positions are associated with corresponding social values. The precision of the results confirms the impression of different practices, purposes, and processes in these three variants. The assumption that the helter-skelter proliferation of group practices overlies a number of ambiguities and contradictions in the aims and methods of the group movement has been refined. The three variants examined here appear to represent distinct ideological trends.