University of Twente Student Theses
Hulphonden : een systematische literatuur review
Voorst, Lisa van der (2015) Hulphonden : een systematische literatuur review.
|
PDF
427kB |
| Abstract: | Dogs can offer different kinds of health benefits to humans. It is therefore not surprising that they can be (and are) applied in a healthcare setting. In this thesis, a closer look will be taken at service dogs: dogs that are specially trained in order to assist people with illnesses that are not related to vision or hearing. Service dogs are being applied more often, are versatile and seem to have a great potential for improving the well-being of their owners. This master thesis therefore has the goal to investigate what is known at this point about service dogs. By proving an overview of this, starting points for new research can be offered. This overview can also aid the application of service dogs in practice by making it easier to assign service dogs to the people who have need for them, which can disburden the health care sector and can be cost-efficient in the long run. In order to investigate what is known about service dogs, a systematic review was performed in which different scientific databases were searched with the term "service dog". The search results were, through the use of exclusion criteria, reduced from 308 to eight articles, which were then compared in different categories. Doing this has shown that service dogs are mainly applied as an assistive intervention for people with physical problems. By performing different physical tasks and accomplishing mainly psychosocial goals, service dogs can induce different physical, psychological, social and economic effects for their owners. At this point there is no clear definition of the term "service dog" and the quality of the examined studies is low. This review shows that service dogs have the potential to be applied as a holistic intervention. However, research of higher quality is required in order to make well-founded claims about the influence of service dogs on the discovered physical, psychological, social and economic effects. Service dogs also seem to be capable of improving the well-being and resilience of their owners, which is interesting since they are mainly applied for a vulnerable group: people with chronic physical disabilities. More research is required in order to confirm this. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
| Faculty: | BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences |
| Subject: | 77 psychology |
| Programme: | Psychology MSc (66604) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/68702 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
Show download statistics for this publication
Show download statistics for this publicationRepository Staff Only: item control page