Altered states: Using Transactional Analysis Education to prevent conflict escalation and violence

This study had two purposes: to find out whether a group who favors their Adult functional ego state will also favor the "I'm OK You're OK" (++) life position and favor collaboration as a conflict-handling mode and to find out if a group that has received Transactional Analysis Education (TAE) will favor their Adult, the ++ life position, and collaboration more than a group that has not received TAE. An inferential correlation analysis was used to support purpose 1, which yielded a moderate significant positive correlation between favoring the Adult and favoring the ++ life position however, a descriptive analysis of the data, in support of Purpose 2, showed that the TAE had little effect on the experimental group. The following recommendations for duplicating the study are provided: use at risk students as subjects, provide a more intense curriculum similar to the Discovery Program, evaluate each component of the TAE separately in order to find out which components help affect change and which do not, use a method of data collection that will enable full use of inferential analysis, and use factor analysis to test for construct validity.