Exploring forgiveness of self and others using integrative methodologies.

The thesis combines qualitative and quantitative methodology to broaden the research into forgiveness. The first part of the thesis uses predominately qualitative methodology to gain information about the understanding of forgiveness and the forgiveness issues of ten mothers who are residing in a six-month drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre. The women provided written life histories and standardised measures to enable psychometric profiles to be generated. Semi-structured interviewing and interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith, 1996) was then used to discover the forgiveness experiences and their meanings for the ten women who took part. Forgiveness issues relate to the forgiveness triad, and the themes to emerge are, intimate relationships, domination, pseudo-forgiveness, the value of forgiveness, process of forgiveness, remorse, instantaneous forgiveness, attitude towards the aggressor, unforgivable, family as forgivers/blood is thicker than water, desire for forgiveness from their children, forgiveness without truth is impossible, forgiveness doesn't always feel good, allowing oneself to be the victim, parenting issues, prostitution, and not to blame. Although there are striking similarities in the forgiveness issues of the women, the study also touches on how individuals can conceptualise forgiveness very differently. This study goes some way to showing that we are all individuals with our own meanings, ideas and realities. People make their own decisions about what forgiveness is and what it means to them.The second part of the thesis uses standardised psychometric tests with student and non-student samples n a series of studies. Some of the studies focussed on variables that seemed to be theoretically relevant from the qualitative studies, in the first part of the thesis, while others followed up theoretical issues suggested by the wider literature on forgiveness. As gender differences in forgiveness have not been studied in great detail in previous studies and the evidence is equivocal all the studies explore for sex differences. No significant sex difference is found with regard to forgiveness of self. However with forgiveness of others the results appear more complex. Females are found to be more forgiving of others than males in two of the studies, while no difference is found in the remaining studies.Failure to forgive self is found to be to be associated with higher anxiety and depression and less hope in males and females and higher somatic symptoms in males. In females failure to forgive others is accompanied by higher anxiety and lower scores on the hope scale, Further, forgiveness of self is found to be more strongly associated with measures of psychological well being than forgiveness of others. In relation to Sukhodolsky et al.'s (2001) 4-factor model of anger rumination many of the anger rumination sub-scales correlated with forgiveness of self and forgiveness of others therefore a series of multiple regressions were performed. Anger memories are found to be the most important aspects in forgiving oneself, and dealing with revenge thoughts are found to be crucial with forgiveness of others.Further, forgiveness of self is found to share a significant positive correlation with emotional intelligence, self-liking, self-competence and optimism among males and females. Also, forgiveness of others shares a significant positive correlation with emotional intelligence among males and females. With forgiveness of self, multiple regression suggests that self-liking and emotional intelligence account for the unique variance In scores among males and optimism and self-liking account for the unique variance in scores among females. With regards to parenting and forgiveness, males forgiveness of self is not significantly correlated with any of the parenting styles of either parent, but forgiveness of others has a significant negative correlation with permissive parents. In females there is no correlation with forgiveness of others and any of the parenting styles. But with regards to forgiveness of self there is a significant negative correlation with the father's authoritarian parenting style. There is a significant positive correlation between democratic father's parenting style and forgiveness of self.