Influencing client expectations about career counseling using a videotaped intervention.

Realistic client expectations about career counseling are essential

to positive client outcomes. The authors investigated a videotaped

intervention designed to influence participants' expectations about

career counseling using a pretest/posttest experimental design. As

measured by the Expectations About Counseling-Brief Form (H. E. A.

Tinsley, 1982), undergraduate participants who watched the videotaped

intervention significantly increased their expectations of personal

commitment to career counseling and decreased their expectations of

counselor expertise compared with participants who watched a control

videotape. A secondary hypothesis, that changes in expectations

would positively affect attitudes toward career counseling as

measured by the Attitudes Toward Career Counseling Scale (A. B.

Rochlen, J. J. Mohr, & B. K. Hargrove, 1999), was not supported.

A long history of research indicates that clients enter counseling with varying expectations about the roles they and the counselor will play, their likelihood of improvement, and the general counseling process itself (e.g., Goldstein, 1962; Heilbrun, 1972). Researchers have theorized about these expectations, and they have been shown to affect numerous aspects of counseling, including the working alliance between client and counselor, clients' level of involvement in counseling, and counseling effectiveness (e.g., Bordin, 1955; Frank, 1968; H. E. A. Tinsley, Tokar, & Helwig, 1994; Tokar, Hardin, Adams, & Brandel, 1996). Some studies have shown that influencing clients' expectations by briefing them about what to expect in counseling has been found to have beneficial effects on counseling, including increased client responsibility and relevant verbal responsiveness (Friedlander & Kaul, 1983), and decreased incidence of early termination of counseling sessions (Heilbrun, 1972). In contrast, H. E. A. Tinsley, Bowman, and Barich (1993) reported that negative or unrealistic client expectations are viewed by counseling practitioners as having a detrimental effect on counseling. They reported that counseling psychologists perceived their clients as most often having unrealistically low expectations about their own level of personal commitment to counseling while simultaneously having unrealistically high expectations about their counselor's level of expertise. Incongruence between expectations about and what actually occurs in counseling is thought to negatively affect counseling (Kelly, 1955). For example, early termination of counseling sessions may result from unconfirmed client expectations about counseling (Borghi, 1968). Taken together, this research suggests that if positive and/or realistic expectations about counseling lead to beneficial results, whereas negative and/or unrealistic expectations lead to detrimental results, it would be desirable for counselors to have the ability to influence client expectations about counseling in the preferred direction.

The ability to influence client expectations may be especially important in the realm of career counseling. In fact, H. E. A. Tinsley et al. (1993) speculated that unrealistically low expectations associated with personal commitment to counseling and unrealistically high expectations related to counselor expertise may be even more detrimental for those seeking vocational or educational counseling. Research has shown that, compared with clients seeking counseling for personal concerns, clients seeking counseling for career concerns expect fewer counseling sessions (June & Smith, 1983). More specifically, Galassi, Crace, Martin, James, and Wallace (1992) found that students seeking career counseling expected counseling to involve about three sessions. It seems reasonable to speculate that career clients' expectation of a rather brief duration for counseling may be linked to unrealistic and potentially detrimental expectations (see H. E. A. Tinsley et al., 1993) that the counselor will be able to "fix" them quickly without much effort on their part. In fact, positive expectations about personal commitment have been found to be positively related to greater client involvement in career counseling (H. E. A. Tinsley et al., 1994). Furthermore, clients who expect to assume more personal responsibility for working hard in counseling are more likely to evaluate their relationship with their counselor as collaborative and productive than are clients who expect an "expert" to solve their problems without having to actively participate themselves (Tokar et al., 1996). It is not uncommon for career counselors to be faced with clients who believe that an interest inventory ("the test"), the counselor, or a combination of the two will provide them with a quick, easy answer to the question of "What should I be when I grow up?"

When clients enter career counseling with unrealistic expectations about what they and their counselors will be doing, practitioners will want to intervene in a way that increases the likelihood of positive outcomes for those clients. Extrapolating from past research, career counselors could reasonably conclude that simply providing individuals with direct, concise information about what they can realistically expect from career counseling should theoretically be useful in changing clients' expectations about counseling, and thus their counseling outcomes. However, no methodologically sound research exists that has examined whether or not expectations about career counseling can be changed. In fact, in a comprehensive review of studies investigating client expectations about counseling in general, H. E. A. Tinsley, Bowman, and Ray (1988) identified several significant methodological concerns related to that body of literature. First, very few researchers provided direct evidence to indicate a successful changing of expectations, and most of the studies failed to randomly assign participants to the experimental conditions. Second, some studies actually measured clients' perceptions about what occurred in counseling rather than clients' expectations about what would occur in counseling; despite their conceptual similarity, expectations about and perceptions of counseling are distinct constructs (Hayes & Tinsley, 1989). Third, most of the studies did not use a comprehensive and psychometrically sound measure of expectations about counseling. Furthermore, given the continuing debate in the literature as to whether clients enter career counseling with the same expectations as clients seeking personal counseling (see Galassi et al., 1992; Hardin & Yanico, 1983; June & Smith, 1983), results of much of the research on changing client expectations may not generalize to expectations about career counseling. Only one unpublished study has specifically examined whether or not expectations about career counseling can be changed. Using a written role induction, Walsh (1993) was successful in changing 5 of 11 expectations about career counseling, as measured by an instrument that was developed for use in her study.

Thus, the primary purpose of this investigation was to extend previous research on influencing client expectations about counseling by examining the effect of a videotaped intervention on college students' expectations about career counseling. In addition to focusing specifically on career counseling, this study extended earlier efforts in two important ways: (a) by using stronger methodological procedures and (b) by using a comprehensive, validated instrument measuring a larger range of expectations about counseling, the Expectations About Counseling-Brief Form (EAC-B, H. E. A. Tinsley, 1982). The EAC-B measures expectancies about client and counselor attitudes and behaviors, counselor characteristics, and counseling process and outcome. The EAC-B may be scored for three broad factors, two of which are important to this study: Personal Commitment (the amount of personal responsibility the client expects to assume in counseling) and Counselor Expertise (the client's expectation that the counselor will be skilled and able to help him or her).

We hypothesized that, after viewing the videotaped intervention about what to expect in career counseling, participants' EAC-B scores would be higher on the Personal Commitment factor and lower on the Counselor Expertise factor than the scores of participants in the control group. A secondary purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between participants' anticipated expectation change and their attitudes toward career counseling. Although both attitudes and expectancies are precounseling variables that have been posited to affect aspects of counseling process and outcome (e.g., Bordin, 1955; Hill, 1991), the relationship between people's attitudes toward and expectations about career counseling has yet to be examined (Rochlen et al., 1999). It is reasonable to speculate that the anticipated changes in participants' expectations about career counseling from pretest to posttest would be predictive of a positive change in participants' attitudes toward career counseling. Thus, a second hypothesis predicted that changes in EAC-B factor scores of the participants in the experimental condition would contribute incrementally (i.e., beyond pretest attitudes toward career counseling) to their posttest attitudes toward career counseling.

Method

Participants