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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
