Abstract
Although Animal-Assisted Interventions (AAI) have gathered a solid empirical background as an effective complement to social, educational and health professions in order to enhance quality of life (QoL), Spanish-speaking countries are just starting to pay attention to possibilities they offer. Thereby, little is known about expectations held by students and professionals towards AAI. Present study was devoted to explore these expectations among two samples of N = 474 university students (M = 22.7; SD = 5.6 year) and N = 207 workers of elder nursing homes (M = 38.5; SD = 9.7 year) from Southern Spain. Participants completed the Improvement of Quality of Life inventory, an instrument that provides information on the changes that AAI may introduce on four fields of QoL (health and wellbeing, autonomy and adaptation, center climate, and social interaction), and a second inventory regarding formative background and intention of implementing AAI. Results shown high expectations among both samples, with means surpassing the scale midpoint (p < 0.001) with big size effects (d > 0.80) in all measures. In addition, 80 % of participants informed to have intention to develop AAI, although just 13 % had any formation in the field. Triangulation of information between different actors, as well as between two complementary levels of analysis, warranted solid conclusions that should serve as a guide to keep developing AAI in Spanish-speaking countries.
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Perea-Mediavilla, M.A., López-Cepero, J. (2017). Expectations Towards Animal-Assisted Interventions and Improvement on Quality of Life: Triangulating Information from Different Actors and Levels of Analysis. In: Maturo, A., Hošková-Mayerová, Š., Soitu, DT., Kacprzyk, J. (eds) Recent Trends in Social Systems: Quantitative Theories and Quantitative Models. Studies in Systems, Decision and Control, vol 66. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40585-8_35
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