Art Therapy Student Libby Kimport Wins Drexel Research Day Award
May 9, 2013
Art Therapy graduate student Elizabeth “Libby” Kimport won a Drexel Research Day Award for her study, The Effectiveness of Clay Work in the Reduction of State Anxiety for Adult Psychiatric Inpatients: A One Group, Pretest-Posttest Design. The purpose of Kimport’s study was to investigate the efficacy of structured creative clay work as a means of decreasing state anxiety in adult psychiatric inpatients. This is the second year in a row that Kimport has won a Research Day Award.
The study employed a one group, pretest-posttest design in which 49 adult participants between the ages of 18 and 65 on a general psychiatric inpatient unit participated on an individual basis. Participants received a brief demonstration conducted by the researcher on how to create clay pinch pots, and were then given 10 minutes to create a pinch pot. The State-Anxiety (S-Anxiety) scale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) was used for pre- and post-intervention measurement. Self-reports of S-Anxiety revealed a significant decrease in anxiety following the clay work intervention.
Kimport also found that the pre S-Anxiety mean score for males was higher than that of females, therefore rendering the amount of decreased anxiety significantly greater for males than for females. These results provide evidence that structured creative clay work is able to effectively reduce state anxiety for adult psychiatric inpatients.