Ideology and Referral Categories in Employee Assistance Program Research

Practitioners tend to employ cultural referral categories when classifying what has motivated clients to enter employee assistance programs (EAPs). These categories are rooted in ideology and used in ways that often conceal the diverse factors leading troubled employees to seek help. In particular, application of the term “self-referral” has grown dramatically while application of the term “supervisory referral” has declined, which may reflect practitioners' underlying beliefs about how employees ought to use EAPs. The article discusses some studies of alcohol treatment efforts for which the use of cultural referral categories made interpretation of the findings difficult. Following a review of the medical and psychiatric literaure on seeking help, the authors call for construction of a grounded theory based on qualitative research, and recommend that EAPs develop more accurate classifications for labeling cases.