Samenvatting

This paper aims to answer the following question:
Does the body awareness of students of Psychomotor Therapy alter to a greater extent than that of students of SPH (Residential Social Work and Pedagogical Services), Business Economics and Communication?
Does gender influence body awareness?
Motive: Literature shows the importance of therapists possessing proper body awareness (Sommeling, Z.D.).Therefore it is important to adequately address body awareness in the education of future therapists, so they can successfully apply this during their intended professional career.
Goal: The goal of the study is to establish whether or not the classes of the study of Psychomotor Therapy (PMT) add to the students' body awareness. This is researched through a comparison with students of the studies of Residential Social Work and Pedagogical Services (SPH), Business Economics (BE) and Communication (CO).
Method: To measure the students' body awareness, the Scale of Body Connection (SBC) is used. The SBC is a questionnaire, 12 questions of which focus on the degree of body awareness of the participant and a further 8 questions focus on their degree of dissociation (Price & Thompson, 2007).
Conclusion: The research has shown a significant difference in degrees of body awareness between students of PMT, and the students of the other educations examined for the purpose of this research. PMT students have a higher degree of body awareness, and will -as the research has also proven- dissociate more than other students, from their second academic year onwards. The differences in did not prove to be significant, apart from in the second academic year. Also, there are no significant results regarding to gender.