To address the need for tools assessing learning environments in counselor education, this session presents empirical findings from the development study of the Multicultural Social Justice-Oriented Learning Environment Scale. It also provides a comprehensive overview of each step in theory-driven scale development and validation. The session will also report evidence for content, structural, convergent, and predictive validities to demonstrate how to apply and interpret psychometric data.
Collaborative research among faculty and students continues to expand in academic settings, (Swank et al., 2020). Despite ethical guidelines, ambiguity persists in authorship determination, reflecting power differentials and inclusion concerns (Swank et al., 2019, 2020; Smith & Williams-Jones, 2012). Participants will examine current practices, analyze equity considerations, and develop a responsive, equity-informed framework with practical strategies for ethical decision-making in authorship.
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.
Fairness is a core component of validity, yet it is often underexamined or treated as an optional analytic step in counseling research. This session reframes fairness as an ongoing interpretive responsibility of the researcher that occurs across the research process. Attendees will learn practical strategies to integrate fairness into study design, measurement, analysis, and reporting to support valid interpretations and ethical score use.
Building on the results from the pilot study, we further investigated the effect of training in Integrated Behavioral Health in Primary Care (IBH) and evidence-based practices (EBPs) across the lifespan on eight cohorts of graduate-level counseling students. We developed and offered our training as a summer program. More than 100 participants were trained in the IBH and EBPs, and we utilized a single-group repeated measures design with multiple cohorts to evaluate the effect
Counseling researchers engage with schools and communities developing and evaluating effective, quality, and valuable programs. Interest holders face increasing pressure to ensure programs are accountable to proposed client outcomes. In this session, we review quantitative and qualitative research designs for formative, process, and summative evaluation plans, highlighting rigor amongst the complexities of data collection and analysis when conducting evaluations in schools and communities.
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.
This session introduces collaborative autoethnography (CAE) as a social justice research methodology and demonstrates its application through a study examining East Asian women international doctoral students’ academic job search experiences. Attendees will learn CAE procedures, trustworthiness strategies, and its strengths for centering marginalized voices. Five themes reveal intersecting systemic barriers. Implications for equitable hiring practices in counselor education will be discussed.
This session presents cutting-edge findings on therapist-client affect dynamics. We compare automated sentiment analysis (LIWC, XLM-T) to human coding (SPAFF), demonstrating how automated tools serve as scalable markers of therapeutic alliance. Furthermore, we reveal that psychotherapy is organized by interaction regimes—distinct modes like strain or stabilization—rather than fixed rules. Attendees will learn to identify these nonstationary shifts and the dyadic nature of emotional coregulation.
Professional mentoring may support school counselors’ well-being and career sustainability, yet empirical research examining how counselors engage in mentoring relationships remains limited. This session presents findings from a national study investigating mentoring engagement and its associations with work engagement, psychological safety, and burnout among practicing school counselors, clarifying mentoring’s distinct role as a professional support within school counseling.
The aim of this presentation is to build researchers’ confidence and competence in managing or participating in large research teams. Presenters will shaThis session introduces collaborative autoethnography (CAE) as a social justice research methodology and demonstrates its application through a study examining East Asian women international doctoral students’ academic job search experiences. Attendees will learn CAE procedures, trustworthiness strategies, and its strengths for centering marginalized voices. Five themes reveal intersecting systemic barriers. Implications for equitable hiring practices in counselor education will be discussed.re perspectives as project leads, faculty mentors, and student coders in a content analysis project. Topics include team structure, collaboration, mentorship, strengths, challenges, and lessons learned, offering strategies to enhance teamwork and avoid common research pitfalls.
This session centers the enduring value of conceptual thinking and writing as foundations of scholarly identity and knowledge creation. As generative AI tools increasingly mediate the research process, scholars face new challenges in teaching and modeling deep, original scholarship. Attendees will learn the benefits and limitations of AI driven citation network mapping tools in both teaching and scholarly applications.
Research can be a powerful form of advocacy by using empirical inquiry to expose injustice and inequity. Both quantitative and qualitative research studies can influence systemic change and advocate for marginalized populations. In this session, attendees will learn how to conceptualize research as a means of advocacy grounded in the AARC Standards for Multicultural Research and MSJCC. Examples of research projects that serve to facilitate systemic change will be presented.
Meet AARC's journal editors for the Measurement & Evaluation in Counseling & Development and Counseling Outocome Research and Evaluation. Learn the aims of each journal. Review the author submission expectations and guidelines. If you've ever asked, what does it takes to get published in MECD and CORE, come find out and questions of the editors!
Counseling researchers often examine correlated predictors such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, and substance misuse when studying clinical outcomes. Hierarchical regression may obscure relative importance when constructs overlap. This session introduces dominance analysis, a method that clarifies predictor importance across regression models. Participants will learn how dominance analysis improves interpretation of counseling assessment data and informs research and clinical decision-making.
Systematic reviews are central to advancing rigorous counseling scholarship, yet relying on library database searches alone can often result in missing relevant studies. This session introduces a multi-faceted approach to article collection, including advanced database strategies and complementary methods (e.g., handsearching, AI tools, and expert review). Attendees will gain practical strategies to improve completeness, transparency, and methodological rigor in systematic review research.
Explore how the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) and Enhanced Critical Incident Technique (ECIT) can strengthen qualitative research in education and counseling. This session highlights key differences, credibility strategies, and practical applications through case examples, helping participants determine when and how to use each method in their own research.
Braun and Clarke’s 2006 article, Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology, seems to have catapulted the use of this method in published research. While the flexibility of the method is likely part of the attraction, the ambiguity of the actual process also can present challenges. It is important for counseling researchers to become familiar with reflexive thematic analysis phases as a way to adhere to rigor, and in turn, conduct quality research that promotes the profession.
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.
This session explores strategies and considerations for teaching and supporting counselor education doctoral students to transition from research consumers to independent researchers. Grounded in scholarly frameworks, the presenters will share insights and examples from teaching doctoral research courses and mentoring doctoral student researchers. Participants will engage in collaborative discussions and leave with implications to enhance their own doctoral-level research instruction.
Join us for a critical examination of what counseling intervention research has – and has not – studied through a PRISMA scoping review of 390 professional counseling intervention articles (2015-2024). We map populations and concerns targeted and neglected; modalities, settings, and specialty areas emphasized; research questions posed; and designs used. Together, we will interrogate strengths, limitations, alignment with counseling foundations, and priorities for research that informs practice.
Professor & Department Head, University of Tennessee
Casey Barrio Minton is Professor and Head of the Department of Counseling, Human Development, and Family Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Spirituality is a critical yet under-assessed dimension of client identity, and counselor education lacks consistent approaches for preparing counselors-in-training (CITs) to assess it with cultural responsiveness. This session examines limitations in current assessment practices, identifies training gaps, and offers a structured, ethically grounded approach for integrating spiritually responsive assessment into counselor education and clinical practice.
Many mental health interventions are developed and implemented without assessing whether communities are ready to adopt and sustain them. This session demonstrates how the Community Readiness Assessment (CRA), a stage-based model, aligns culturally responsive mental health strategies with a community’s readiness level. Interviews with 26 Asian leaders across 11 Wisconsin regions, scored across five CRA domains, identified distinct readiness stages with implications for mental health planning.
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.
This education session examines strategies for fostering interprofessional collaborative scholarship to support integrated care workforce development. Drawing on lessons from HRSA Behavioral Health Workforce grants (PITCH & PEP), presenters will share research-informed frameworks for conceptualizing, implementing, and disseminating team-based scholarship that advances integrated care education and strengthens professional collaboration.
Students engaging in internship report an increase efficacy in assessment skills and implementing crisis intervention (Fields et al., 2023). This study (a) explores emerging themes of students’ experiences one-year post-graduation following their enrollment in a trauma-informed professional pipeline, (b) identifies key challenges and opportunities experienced when working with CAYs who have experienced trauma, and (c) delineates areas for future research and implications for counselor educators.
Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Jennifer D. Deaton, PhD, LCMHC (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Counseling and Educational Development at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
This session presents findings from a reflexive thematic analysis of interviews with nine counselor educators recognized as AI experts. We explore how educators navigate tensions between cognitive development and accessibility, address clinical readiness concerns, and implement intentional pedagogical strategies. Participants will learn evidence-based approaches to integrating AI into curriculum, supporting students, and developing institutional guidelines.
Experimental analogue design has been used increasingly in fields that involve working with vulnerable topics and populations, allowing for “real-world” simulations while taking precaution to avoid foreseeable harm to participants (Cook & Rumrill, 2005). This presentation will cover the design, the benefits and drawbacks, and the overall relevance to the counseling field. Through content lecture and activity, participants will leave with concrete knowledge to apply to future research studies.
Suicide remains a significant concern for middle and high school youth, placing school‑based counselors in critical frontline roles. However, training in evidence‑based suicide prevention is inconsistent, and systematic outcome tracking is rare. This methods‑focused session presents implementation‑science–informed strategies for monitoring intervention effectiveness, fidelity, and follow‑up using a scalable digital outcome‑tracking tool.
Research challenges the harmful misconception that Black, Latinx, low-income, and limited English-speaking families do not value education or client success, a narrative that sustains systemic barriers to engagement in counseling contexts. This session examines how assessment data informed culturally responsive, client and family-centered workshops. Using pre/post surveys, outcome indicators, and focus groups, findings demonstrate how data-driven interventions strengthen engagement.
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.
This presentation examines transcendental phenomenology as a rigorous qualitative methodology in counselor education. Drawing on Husserl and Moustakas, it clarifies distinctions between transcendental and hermeneutic approaches and outlines core analytic procedures (e.g., horizontalization, reduction, synthesis). Participants will learn strategies to enhance rigor and trustworthiness and apply these methods in counselor education and supervision contexts.
Clinicians hold valuable practice-based knowledge that is often absent from scholarly literature. This interactive session, led by the editorial team of the Journal of Counseling Sexology & Sexual Wellness, helps counselors transform clinical expertise into publishable manuscripts. Participants will learn how to identify strong topics, navigate peer review, overcome common barriers, and leave with a concrete action plan for moving from idea to submission.
This session explores how Practice-Based Research and Participatory Action Research build a data-to-action pipeline to address systemic inequities and bridge research and counseling practice. Using school counselor training examples, we share outcomes (e.g., fewer discipline referrals, higher student belonging), co-designed interventions, and tools that turn data into sustainable, equity-focused change. Implications for adapting this model across counselor preparation context will be discussed.
The presenter is an Associate Professor at Clemson University. She is a licensed professional counselor, certified school counselor, and nationally certified counselor. She has been involved in AARC since 2013, including being a past emerging leader, and is currently the Treasurer... Read More →
Amanda Giordano, PhD, LPC is an associate professor of counseling at the University of Georgia. Dr. Giordano works to advance the counseling field with rigorous research and has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. As a counselor educator, Dr. Giordano regularly... Read More →
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.
Psychopathology arises from neurocognitive processes, yet most instruments used in counseling focus only on symptoms. This presentation demonstrates tasks (e.g., Stroop, Wisconsin Card Sort, n-back, RTID) to measure mechanisms like working memory, executive function, and emotional states. With access to pre-conscious states, lessened self-report biases, and sensitivity to earlier change, participants will learn how to enhance assessment batteries and the empirical rationale for doing so.
Research mentorship is a cornerstone of counseling graduate education, supported by best practices. Yet at some point, both educators and students must shift from a traditional mentorship model to a true research partnership and the skills required for effective collaboration are rarely taught explicitly. This session explores strategies for strengthening research mentorship with the goal of developing confident, capable, and collaborative research partners in the counseling profession.
Elizabeth A. Prosek (she/her/hers), PhD, LPC, NCC, is a Professor of Education and Professor-in-Charge of Counselor Education at Penn State University. Her research interests include counseling military populations; community engagement and program evaluation; co-occurring presenting... Read More →
This presentation introduces the AI-III workshop model, a structured framework for integrating generative AI in counselor education. A mixed-methods program evaluation examined its quality and effectiveness. Preliminary findings support an ethically grounded and sustainable approach to AI integration in counselor training. Participants will gain practical, evidence-informed strategies for responsible AI implementation across roles as learners, practitioners, supervisors, and educators.
Students’ mentorship experiences are pivotal in developing research competence and efficacy. Yet, much of the current research focuses on doctoral students, ignoring opportunities to support trainees across the academic lifespan. Our educational session presents a multitiered model of student research mentorship to provide targeted engagement activities and meaningful scaffolding. This model helps students develop research confidence while supporting sustainability within counselor education.
Counselors are expected to develop diagnostic clinical reasoning skills that are culturally responsive, evidence-based, and ethically sound, yet counseling research continues to highlight gaps in how diagnostic competence is assessed. This session introduces a diagnostic decision-making model grounded in clinical reasoning, self-efficacy, and cultural humility. In addition, the federally funded program evaluation plan will be discussed, along with practice for experiential components.
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.
Amanda Giordano, PhD, LPC is an associate professor of counseling at the University of Georgia. Dr. Giordano works to advance the counseling field with rigorous research and has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. As a counselor educator, Dr. Giordano regularly... Read More →
This session explores AI as a counselor-support tool for deploying, scoring, interpreting, and using assessment data in clinical care. Participants will examine how AI can synthesize structured, text, audio, video, and longitudinal data to identify patterns, support report drafting, and inform treatment planning while preserving counselor oversight, ethical safeguards, privacy, and culturally responsive interpretation.
This session introduces semantic network analysis as a method for examining narratives in counseling research and training. Participants will explore foundational concepts, learn basic analytic steps, and examine examples using narrative and textual data. Illustrative examples will demonstrate the application of semantic network analysis to counseling research and practice.
Despite demands for specialized skills in community crisis settings, counselor training remains inconsistent. This education session presents a stakeholder-informed concept mapping methodology to systematically identify and assess essential crisis competencies. Attendees will explore this research design, learn to develop a focus prompt, and examine how to translate stakeholder data into measurable outcomes for counselor education curricula and clinical supervision.
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.
