The therapeutic alliance has a well-documented relationship to client success in counseling. Understanding and assessing this alliance can offer important insight into client experiences and provide valuable training feedback for CITs. This presentation explores relationships between therapeutic alliance and client distress outcomes in a university training clinic, considers implications for counselor training and identifies future research directions for training clinics and CIT development.
This study uses the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews to explore what is known about the role of investigators in birth family searches for transnational adoptees. Findings indicate that search investigation is an unregulated practice, investigators utilize traditional and digital search methods, navigate the complex sociopolitical landscape of transnational adoption, and expend significant emotional labor.
Therapist self-disclosure (TSD) remains widely debated in psychotherapy, with limited research examining youth perspectives. This session highlights adolescents’ views of TSD and its role in shaping the therapeutic relationship. Using Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) for data collection and Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR) for analysis, findings illustrate how TSD influences trust, engagement, and rapport with youth, including implications for counselor educators and supervisors.
Rural school counselors often receive limited preparation for the contextual demands of rural practice, and little research has examined how rural-focused training can be effectively evaluated. This session presents the development and preliminary evaluation of a four-module training designed to prepare counselors-in-training to apply the Rural School Counseling Competencies (RSCC) in rural school contexts. Preliminary findings from a mixed-methods evaluation will be shared.
Sustaining improvements in couple counseling is challenging, as repeated conflict can undermine satisfaction. This study examines hope as a dyadic mediator linking perceived conflict to each partner’s satisfaction. Using dyadic couple data and an Actor–Partner Interdependence Mediation Model (APIMeM), we test how conflict affects both partners’ satisfaction through hope. Findings may inform interventions that enhance hope to maintain therapeutic gains over time.
This session explores practical strategies for collecting and analyzing data from two federal grant-funded projects (i.e., National Science Foundation DRK-12 and Department of Education GEAR UP) with an emphasis on elevating participant voices. Participants will gain skills to productively organize participant data while also conducting grant projects at the same time. Examples of participant data and findings will be provided.
