TPC Journal-Vol 9- Issue 4-FULL ISSUE

328 The Professional Counselor | Volume 9, Issue 4 skills in communication and referral. They also noted how they received important education on mental health and causes of mental health problems, and an enhanced awareness of mental health in communication. Finally, participants reported that there were both personal and community benefits to the program, such as an ability to better understand their own mental health and the mental health of family members as well as a reduction in community mental health stigma (Van Leeuwen et al., 2016). However, to date no study has reported the quantitative outcomes of MHF trainings. Most trainings include pre- and post-training assessments of participants using a true-false, pencil-and-paper–based assessment. The assessment for the original MHF curriculum had three small adaptations involving changing the wording on several questions in 2009, 2011, and 2013. The adaptations were minimal, so all years were included in this study. This study fills the gap in the MHF literature by reporting on the objective data gathered from the pre- and post-training assessments of the original MHF curriculum. Methods This study uses a quasi-experimental research design to evaluate whether participants in 88 MHF original trainings demonstrated increased knowledge of mental health issues and approaches to address community mental health concerns. The trainings spanned from 2009–2017 and included all MHF trainings conducted outside of the European Union and the United States. For each MHF training, pre- and post-training assessments were completed by all participants in an effort to evaluate the effectiveness of training. The pre- and post-training assessments contained 50 true-false questions with the pretest administered on the first day of training and the posttest administered at the final training day, 5 days later. The present study analyzed the pretest and posttest evaluations using paired t-tests and a one-way ANOVA. Participants Participants who completed all items on both the pretests and posttests were included in the study, resulting in 1,392 participants from 15 countries. Of the 1,392 participants, only 735 provided descriptive information. For those participants, 431 were female (59%) and 304 were male (41%). The age range of participants was 17 to 75 years with a mean age of 36 years. The education of participants ranged from elementary school to doctoral (PhD) and professional degrees (MD and JD). There were 14 participants reporting only an elementary school level of education (2%), 150 with high school (20%), 151 with a 2-year degree (21%), 310 with a 4-year degree (42%), 99 with a master’s degree (13%), and 11 with a PhD or professional degree (1%). Given that trainings were conducted in countries within North America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, the data included a diverse range of participants in terms of nationality. Research Questions There were two primary questions investigated in this study. The questions were prompted by a desire to better understand the effectiveness of the MHF trainings: (1) Does the MHF program training significantly increase overall knowledge of mental health facilitation from pretest to posttest evaluation for participants? and (2) How does performance on the pretest, or initial mental health knowledge, affect possible training gains made between pretest and posttest scores for the participants? Data Preparation Prior to formal data analyses, the authors examined the data to ensure it satisfied the assumptions of the relevant statistical tests. Upon initial data examination, the authors determined that 77 participants of an initial 1,392 were outliers. The outliers were those with scores 1.5 times the interquartile range, either above the third quartile or below the first quartile. Based on this, the data analyses presented in