A Brief History of Psychology and Missions in JPT: Looking Back, Around, and Forward

Consolidating gains Hall & Schram (1999) noted that since the early 1970s, the field of psychology had firmly established a place for itself in missions work, culminating in the creation of the new missionary discipline of member care, the leveraging of advancements in psychometrics on pre-field psychological assessments, and the promotion of a more robust understanding of the missionary family as a whole, with particular attention being given to missionary children. Since the publication of the fourth JPT special issue on psychology and missions (1999), selection-oriented studies in JPT have focused on various themes, from marital satisfaction (Cousineau, Hall, Rosik, & Hall, 2007) to issues relevant to short-term missionaries (Barnett, Duvall, Edwards, & Hall, 2005). While there has been encouraging progress in the development of clearer, more robust ethical guidelines for those who serve missionaries (coupled by an increased awareness of global mental health needs), one of the pressing ethical issues that remains current to this day is the need to provide culturally-appropriate mental health care to the tens of thousands of missionaries who do not hail from the same cultural background as many of the mental health care providers. For greater effectiveness and stewardship, the mental health and missions field needs more professionals to develop programs of research that include clinical outcome studies and longitudinal/ large-sample studies on missionary assessment and personnel selection-all conducted with a sensitivity to the rich diversity of missionary personnel living and serving in a highly mobile and electronic world.