This session examines researcher bias within Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and its implications for rigor in counselor education research. Participants will explore how subjectivity functions within hermeneutic inquiry, identify analytic risks such as the “black box” effect, and apply reflexive strategies to enhance transparency, credibility, and methodological coherence in IPA studies.
School engagement predicts academic and long-term outcomes, yet contextual influences are often overlooked. Grounded in Ecological Social Justice School Counseling, an SDOH-informed framework, this study uses adolescent data from the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Using SEM, links between SDOH and engagement, mediation by parent relationships, and demographic differences are explored. Findings underscore systemic inequities and offer implications for school counseling practice.
This session will present results of an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of a newly developed scale to measure posttraumatic growth. Attendees will learn about the scale-item development process including factor solutions and model fit, as well as the results of evidence for validity and reliability based on data from 1,600 respondents. We will discuss implications for the use of this scale in research and how that can influence counseling practice.
For research findings to inform clinical practice and create systemic change, they must be accessible to practitioners and community members. Peer reviewed journal articles are limited in terms of accessibility and counseling researchers must consider diverse methods of knowledge dissemination for clinical practice to be informed by rigorous research. In this session, presenters will discuss varied ways to disseminate research including grant-funded professional development opportunities.
Authorship is a common yet complex ethical issue in counseling research. This interactive session will explore professional standards, power dynamics, and practical strategies for determining authorship and order of authorship across collaborative teams. Through case discussion and guided reflection, attendees will develop skills to prevent and address authorship conflicts, promote transparency, and strengthen ethical and inclusive research collaboration.
This session explores researcher identity development within counselor education, emphasizing key influences such as doctoral training, mentorship, and scholarly community. Through guided reflection and collective discussion, participants will evaluate their researcher identity and learn strategies to foster a sustainable research agenda and scholarly voice.
Randomized control trials (RCTs) are relatively rare in the counseling literature despite the strengths of this research design to inform evidence-based counseling practice. Come learn the scope (e.g., client populations, presenting concerns, modalities) and methodological quality (e.g., randomization procedures, intervention fidelity, data analysis) of RCTs published in counseling journals between 2015 and 2024. Opportunities and strategies for RCT research in counseling will be discussed.
Delphi methodology is widely used in counseling research to develop competencies, standards, and professional guidance, yet methodological practices vary considerably across studies. This session presents findings from a systematic scoping review of Delphi studies in counseling research and introduces a framework to support transparent, defensible methodological decisions when designing, reviewing, or interpreting Delphi research.
Counseling researchers increasingly use artificial intelligence in assessment and research, creating ethical challenges related to transparency, bias, authorship, and data privacy. This session introduces the EQUITY-AI Framework, a structured ethical decision-making model grounded in counseling ethics and research integrity literature. Participants learn to apply the framework across the research lifecycle to guide responsible AI use in counseling research contexts.
Counselors emphasize individualized treatment for diverse clients, but interventions are often guided by studies that assess average treatment effects. Causal machine learning provides a rigorous way to estimate who benefits most (or may be harmed) from specific interventions using clinical trial data, offering data-driven insights to achieve better individual outcomes. This session discusses the use of causal machine learning to support more precise, ethical, and client-centered practice.
Research and program evaluation are essential components of the counseling curricula. However, master’s-level counselors-in-training (CITs) often report anxiety and self-doubt in their abilities to engage with research. This presentation will explore the role of interactive and experiential learning on CITs’ research anxiety and experiences in research courses. The presenters will review creative strategies that may empower CITs’ learning and promote their growth as practitioner-scholars.
This session applies Boyer’s Four Functions of Scholarship—discovery, integration, application, and teaching—to counseling and counselor education. Presenters invite attendees to consider broader, more inclusive understandings of scholarly work and to explore ways counseling programs can recognize and reward diverse forms of knowledge production. Strategies for successfully promoting one’s integrative, applied, or pedagogical scholarly pursuits will be shared.
Predicting safety issues with new clients can feel like fortune telling and often causes clinician anxiety. Hopelessness has long been identified as one of the most prominent warning signs for suicidal thoughts and behaviors, but articulating these feelings can look different to each individual client. The presentation will review approaches to assessing and treating suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and present new findings to inform updated assessment prompts for identifying suicide risk.
Professional mentoring may support school counselors’ well-being and sustainability, yet existing measures offer limited applicability for research. This presentation describes the development and initial validation of the Mentoring Engagement Scale, a self-report measure of mentoring engagement. Results from 324 U.S. school counselors supported a two-factor structure—Investment and Impact—and demonstrated evidence of reliability and validity, with implications for research and practice.
Ethnographic case study (ECS) methodology offers counseling researchers a rigorous approach to examining culture, identity, development, and learning. This session introduces ECS foundations, design considerations, and application, covering case selection, conceptual framework, sampling, data sources, analysis, trustworthiness, and ethical practice. This session will equip attendees to adapt ECS across diverse counseling research contexts.
This education session introduces multilevel structural equation modeling (MLSEM) for analyzing hierarchically structured data. Attendees will learn foundational concepts including multilevel modeling, multilevel CFA, and the stepwise MLSEM analytic process. Using Davidov et al.'s (2012) cross-cultural measurement noninvariance study as a worked example, this session demonstrates how MLSEM addresses measurement invariance through contextual predictors.
Ableism remains underexamined in counselor education, often reduced to accommodation compliance over systemic change. This session shares results from a mixed methods study on counselor educators' understanding of ableism. While more training predicted higher confidence, confidence was not related to lower ableism. Qualitative themes revealed knowledge gaps and a pervasive accommodation focus. Attendees will gain concrete strategies for moving toward intentional, disability-affirming practices.
Grounded in our ethical responsibility for inclusivity, this session introduces critical evidence-based research pedagogy and inquiry-based learning in counselor education. Participants will define core principles, evaluate integration across CACREP-aligned courses, and design an inquiry-based strategy with measurable outcomes. Through guided discussion and hands-on application, attendees will link theory to practice to foster equity, critical consciousness, and ethical evidence-based care.
CACREP requires doctoral students to receive faculty mentorship. Empirically we know the importance of this mentorship on researcher identity and that these benefits are greater when centering intersectional and cultural factors. However: how does this look practically? Our panel includes counselor educators who identify as female, Full Professors, at high research institutions. We’ll discuss our doctoral mentoring experiences rooted in research-informed strategies and intersectional feminism.
This session examines autoethnography as a rigorous qualitative research framework (Adams et al., 2015; Ellis et al., 2011) within Counselor Education. Presenters will explore its epistemology, methodology, and possibilities for reflexive scholarship. The session will demonstrate the use of autoethnography in researching immigrant re-professionalization, highlighting how self-reflective inquiry illuminates systemic barriers, identity shifts, and resilience in cross-cultural contexts.
When it is not possible to apply randomization in a research study design, we limit our ability to draw causal conclusions from the results. This presentation will explore the two categories of methodological approaches of quasi-experimental research design that improve our ability to generalize such a study: analytic and design-based approaches. We will explore the designs of each approach to explore how each one works and what might work best for your intended research studies.
This mixed methods study evaluated Hope Matters, a school counselor–led group intervention grounded in Snyder’s hope theory. Using a pre–post–follow-up test design with 135 students (grades 3–7), results showed significant increases in hope, but no improvements in attendance, grades, or discipline referrals. Interviews with six counselors identified key themes that influenced implementation. Participants will learn the hope intervention and how to apply a mixed methods approach to evaluation
The Forgiveness Reconciliation Inventory (FRI, Author, 2021)) is a counseling tool to measure an individual's process through forgiveness and conflict. The FRI may be used to assess emotional safety, manage conflict, and address trauma, often distinguishing between and individual’s need for forgiveness versus the safety of reconciliation. In this session, attendees will earn how to integrate the FRI into assessment, practice, and research.
This session introduces Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs), emphasizing their framework, measurement, and significance for counseling research. Attendees will learn why PCEs are needed alongside the field’s strong focus on ACEs in research and practice. Presenters will review key frameworks, measurement approaches and limitations, and the value PCEs add to counseling research, along with recent findings and future directions.
Counseling researchers have an important role to play in the advancement of the profession through the collection, analysis, and dissemination of advocacy-informed data. This content session will 1) introduce approaches to research that support counseling advocacy efforts; 2) discuss the importance of public statements and making data available and consumable to counseling stakeholders; and 3) facilitate a discussion on how counseling researchers view advocacy in their work.
Anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies at the state and federal level have inhibited research participation among historically minoritized groups, who were already underrepresented in counseling research. In this roundtable, we will discuss barriers to participation in research for minoritized groups, present strategies from the literature for recruiting and retaining research participants from minoritized backgrounds, and collaborate on unique approaches for counseling research.
Inductive Content Analysis (ICA) research is popular and used in diverse ways in counselor education. ICA allows scholars to uncover big-picture patterns when prior knowledge is fragmented or has not been discovered. Thus, scholars must use a systematic approach to conduct ICA research in counseling. We will present Schreier’s six step model for conducting inductive content analysis projects to help attendees learn to design and conduct rigorous ICA research.
Daniel DeCino (pronouns-he/him/his) is an Associate Professor in the Division of Counseling and Psychology Programs at the University of South Dakota. Dr. DeCino is a former middle school counselor in Colorado and he earned his Ph.D. in Counselor Education and Supervision from the... Read More →
This session presents a 25-year scoping review (2002–2024) mapping trauma education in U.S. graduate counseling and Health Service Psychology programs. Following Arksey and O'Malley framework and PRISMA-ScR guidelines, 35 articles were analyzed, revealing systemic gaps in curriculum, educator preparation, and institutional support. Attendees will learn scoping review methodology and evidence-based recommendations for strengthening trauma training in counseling programs.
This session will provide an overview of a newly released textbook entitled “Neuroscience-Integrated Assessment in Counseling: Culturally Responsive Practices and Procedures” with the design for graduate-level instruction for counselor education. Using a mixture of informative and interactive ways, the co-authors will use a case study(s) from the text to invite the audience to conduct a smaller group exercise designed to practice the application of the text to teaching an assessment course.
This session shares results from the largest open journal systematic review of school counseling interventions to date, analyzing 25 years of peer-reviewed studies (2001–2025) to help identify what works, what’s missing, whose needs are being centered, methodological strengths and weaknesses, and how the field is moving forward. Participants will gain a clear overview of trends (and gaps) from this expansive body of work, as well as gain access to a clearinghouse of 200+ intervention articles.
This session discusses multi-group interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) as a method for transnational counseling research. Extending traditional IPA, multi-group IPA uses different subsamples to explore shared and group-specific experiential themes, making it well-suited for research that focuses on counseling practice across national contexts. The session presents key procedures of multi-group IPA and uses a study of Chinese counselors across countries to illustrate its application.
This session presents a reflexive thematic analysis of counselor educators’ beliefs about Universal Design for Learning (UDL) using post-sort interview data from a Q methodology study. Attendees will examine themes such as systemic limitations, overwhelming demands, and vulnerability, and learn how RTA deepens interpretation of perspectives in counselor education research.
This presentation explores how student-to-school counselor ratios influence student outcomes, including performance on standardized math and English assessments, chronic absenteeism, high school graduation, and college enrollment. The presenter examines how these effects vary across different contexts. Emphasis is placed on the role of school counselors in supporting student development across academic, career, and social/emotional domains.
Comprehensive masters student assessment that clearly correlates with remediation and retention procedures, CACREP standards, and provides legal protections is an ongoing challenge for many counselor education programs. In this session, we share practical strategies on how to expand individual student assessment procedures to continuously and systematically target student knowledge, skills, and dispositions, and how to modify remediation and retention procedures to align with assessments
This session presents findings from a quasi-experimental study examining an AI-based simulation and feedback intervention's effectiveness on CITs' broaching attitudes/behaviors and counseling self-efficacy. Results revealed significant broaching improvement (p = .019, d = 0.83) and medium-to-large self-efficacy effects between control and experimental groups. Attendees will explore how AI-supported practice can supplement traditional andragogy to enhance CITs' counseling skills.
This session focuses on narrative analysis and narrative inquiry as ways of understanding lived experience and identity through stories. Participants will explore key differences between analysis of narratives and narrative analysis, and engage in reflective activities to examine their own experiences. The session highlights how storytelling supports meaning-making, identity development, and self-awareness in counseling contexts.
Missing data can introduce bias and error, threatening the accurate interpretation of test scores. The presenter will review the threats of missing data to the accuracy of parameters and standards errors as well as strategies for appropriate handling it. Expressly, the presenter will discuss the importance of assessing the missingness mechanism and level of missing to accurately select the appropriate deletion or imputation procedure.
The RARE Model framework was originally designed to help reluctant faculty engage in program assessment. Counseling students often present with similar apprehensions and limiting beliefs when it comes to research: “I’m not a research person!” This session shows how the RARE Model can be applied in counselor education to foster confidence and support research identity development through intentional, practice-based strategies.
ACES conference presentations are a central way counselor educators and supervisors engage with research, especially for those in positions that do not require publication in scholarly journals. Yet, no researchers have examined trends in research-focused ACES presentations. We will present the findings from our content analysis study of ACES conference presentation descriptions from 1992 to 2025 to identify patterns and gaps in how counselor educators frame and discuss research.
This session explores how artificial intelligence can be ethically and effectively integrated into counseling research. Attendees will examine practical applications of AI across qualitative and quantitative methods, including Q methodology, narrative inquiry, and survey design. Emphasis will be placed on preserving researcher reflexivity, trustworthiness & rigor, minimizing bias, and using AI as a tool to enhance human interpretation and meaning-making.
This session presents preliminary findings from interviews and assessments with 18 counseling students enrolled in a crisis and trauma course. Results highlight how relational pedagogy, structured reflection, and experiential learning support students’ emotional regulation, reflexivity, and perceived preparedness. Attendees will gain strategies for assessing student outcomes in trauma training and integrating experiential evaluation into counselor education.
While research on intercultural couples has primarily focused on their unique relational challenges, cultural humility emerges as a valuable resource toward relational flourishing. Drawing on two quantitative studies, this session presents theoretically-informed pathways linking cultural humility to relational satisfaction via cultural sharing and self-expansion. Attendees will leave with strategies for supporting intercultural couples in counseling and clinical training contexts.
This session explores Endarkened Narrative Inquiry (ENI) as a decolonial approach to researching the healing of emerging adult Black women. Centered on Black feminist thought and womanism, ENI disrupts Eurocentric ideals through intergenerational "Wisdom Whispers" and spirit-driven narratives. We examine how centering these voices and storytelling informs culturally responsive research and counseling to better serve marginalized groups.
The public accessibility of data does not eliminate the researcher's obligation to protect the individuals represented within it. Through analysis of sample publications and pre-existing data, this presentation examines the ethical risks of using publicly accessible data in academic manuscripts and offers guidance for determining what should and should not be published. The session concludes with an applied exercise using the ethical frameworks presented.
This presentation will focus on how to conduct a multiple time points (i.e., longitudinal) counseling research study. The presenters will discuss how to conceptualize a study, receive institutional review board approval, collect and analyze data, and disseminate findings. A longitudinal study on counselor well-being will be provided with results analyzed using structural equation modeling. Attendees will leave with knowledge to generate their own longitudinal study.
Using 2018-2025 data from a CMHC training clinic, this trend analysis explores prevalence and severity of reported attention issues before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic for college student clients. Treatment effects of counselors-in-training will be analyzed to identify direct and third-variable effects, evaluating mediating relationships of anxiety and depression with student age and attention scores to identify potential differences of younger and older college clients over time.
This session focuses on advancing career counseling research for first-generation college students (FGCSs) through multidimensional approaches. We will examine FGCS research examples integrating methodologies, such as latent profile analysis, meta-analysis, and longitudinal SEM. Attendees will learn how these projects capture FGCSs’ dynamic career trajectories and subgroup heterogeneity, thereby providing a rigorous empirical foundation for future research and evidence-based practice for FGCSs.
As attachment theory is increasingly used in counseling, accurate assessment is essential. This session presents findings from a study of counseling students examining the convergent and discriminant validity of the primary attachment style questionnaire (PASQ) with measures of adult attachment and self-object needs. Results show borderline-secure styles actually reflect self-deficits more than attachment. Attendees will learn how these patterns inform the clinical use of attachment assessments.
Evaluating counseling training programs can be challenging when relying on a single method. This session presents a sequential explanatory mixed methods case study evaluating relational training for mental health volunteers supporting youth with caregiver cancer. Quantitative results were followed by qualitative data to explain and deepen findings. Participants will learn how integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches can strengthen program evaluation in counseling.
This presentation evaluates the utility of the Sporting Resilience Model (Gupta & McCarthy, 2022) among collegiate student-athletes. A hierarchical multiple regression is used to examine the unique and incremental variance explained by 10 biopsychosocial protective factors and their relative contributions to resilience. Findings will inform assessment practices, higher education programming, intervention development, and outcome monitoring to enhance student-athlete performance and well-being.
This presentation will present the final results of an RCT on Gottman Method Couples Therapy for the treatment of couples dealing with Infidelity. The results include qualitative and quantitative findings. The quantitative results have been analyzed using dyadic analysis (Actor Partner Interdependence Model), as well as Mixed-Linear Modeling which analyzed behavioral measures, relationship variables, and relationship satisfaction outcomes. Qualitative results from interviews are also included.
This presentation delivers practical applications of geographic information systems (GIS) in counseling research and assessment. Using a spatial analysis of Medicare-approved mental health counselors and social determinants of mental health, the presentation shows how GIS can enhance counseling research. Attendees will gain an applied overview of data and technical requirements, as well as strategies for mapping and analyzing geographic patterns to inform research and assessment practices.
Artificial intelligence tools are rapidly entering counseling education and practice, yet many programs lack guidance for addressing them ethically. This session introduces a practical framework for developing AI literacy grounded in counseling ethics and professional identity. Participants will explore key AI concepts and strategies for critically evaluating AI-generated information used in research, assessment, and professional practice.
Exclusionary discipline remains common despite evidence linking suspension to negative outcomes. This session frames discipline as a measurable system using an MTSS lens. Participants will learn to analyze referral patterns, disaggregated outcomes, and fidelity indicators to identify gaps and evaluate impact. A checklist-based evaluation tool shows how measurement can guide intervention selection, monitor effectiveness, and support equitable, evidence-based discipline systems.
