This session presents development and validation of the Counseling Self-Efficacy Sources Scale (CSESS), a 25-item instrument assessing Bandura's four self-efficacy sources in counselor training. Findings from 271 counseling students demonstrate strong psychometric properties. The session also offers practical guidance on using CSESS profiles to inform teaching, supervision, and curriculum design. Attendees gain tools to assess and cultivate self-efficacy in counseling students.
This session presents quantitative findings examining multicultural counseling self-efficacy and mental illness stigma among counseling students, with multicultural training climate as a moderator. Results highlight how training environments influence measurable student outcomes. Attendees will gain strategies for assessing training climate and evaluating its impact on multicultural competence and stigma reduction.
Emerging scholarship suggests social media can serve as a naturalistic dataset capturing dimensions of human experiences that assessments, surveys, and interviews may exclude. Drawing on research from online communities, this session questions what can count as data for publication in counseling. Attendees will be able to critically evaluate digital data sources and apply them across counseling research contexts, while also comparing whether the nature of this data applies to their own research.
Counselor education emphasizes social justice advocacy, yet programs lack clear assessment tools to evaluate how students and educators engage in advocacy discourse. This session introduces a Reflexive Social Justice Feedback Loop as an assessment-informed framework for measuring intentional, culturally responsive advocacy development. Attendees will gain research and assessment strategies aligned with MSJCC and counselor training outcomes.
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) positions researcher subjectivity as central to meaning-making, creating tension around rigor and transparency. This session examines how analysis can become a “black box” and provides practical strategies, including reflexivity and audit trails, to enhance transparency and strengthen credibility in IPA research.
Many counseling researchers are skilled in instrument development and psychometric testing, but the scoring procedures for these instruments are often basic or undetermined. It is necessary for researchers to be familiar with and able to determine rigorous scoring procedures for the instruments they develop. The purpose of this presentation is to describe four methodologies that the presenters tested to create the scoring procedures for their original tool: the Community Readiness Instrument.
