Mobile Edition
Print
Get the Mag
Weekly UpdatesSubscales. The Professional Development Concerns subscale measures the importance placed on understanding and broadening one's sense of the profession and identity as a counseling professional. This scale contains nine items, with factor loadings ranging from .58 to .69, with sufficient internal consistency ([alpha] = .82). Sample items for this subscale include "understanding the place of multicultural issues in the practice of counseling" and "to gain a better foundation of legal issues in mental health counseling."
The Adjustment Concerns subscale measures the importance placed on personal tasks associated with successfully negotiating graduate training and coping with related stressors. The Adjustment Concerns factor is measured by eight items, with factor loadings ranging from .52 to .82, and has adequate internal consistency ([alpha] = .87). Sample items for this factor include "find a mentor and understand more about the mentoring process" and "develop ways to balance salient roles in my life with the role of graduate student."
The Job-Search Concerns subscale measures the importance placed on planning for and accomplishing the tasks associated with attaining a position within the counseling profession. The factor consists of six items, with factor loadings ranging from .62 to .84, and has a sufficient level of internal consistency ([alpha] = .84). Sample items for this factor include "to obtain helpful information on negotiating job offers" and "to obtain helpful skills to establish a job search network."
The Academia Concerns subscale measures the importance placed on acquiring the information needed for establishing oneself as counselor education faculty member. The factor consists of nine items, with factor loadings ranging from .68 to .89, and has internal consistency ([alpha] = .92). Sample items for this factor include "learning more about the development of a counselor educator" and "learning more about the academic journal publication process."
Career stages. As a second and more general way to measure career concerns, we used the Adult Career Concerns Inventory (ACCI; Super, Thompson, Lindeman, Myers, & Jordaan, 1988). The ACCI measured level of concern with or planfulness for the developmental tasks of the four career stages of exploration, establishment, maintenance, and disengagement posited in Super's life-span, life-space theory (Super et al., 1996). The ACCI consists of items measuring demands, challenges, and expectations that define the tasks. In each of the four stages, 5-item scales measure three tasks. Thus, the ACCI has 12 scales and 60 items. Participants respond on an attitudinal response scale with five levels of concern ranging from 1 = no concern to 5 = great concern. For the purposes of this study, only the Exploration and Establishment scales with corresponding subscales were used. The highest score indicates the tasks that are of greatest concern.
In a study supporting the validity of the ACCI, Halpin, Ralph, and Halpin (1990) found alpha reliability and Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranged between .94 and .95 for the Exploration and Establishment scales with a sample of graduate nursing students. The validity of the ACCI has been supported by other studies (see Cairo, Kritis, & Myers, 1996).
The Exploration scale measures the effort that individuals make to acquire information about themselves as well as possible occupations in order to make a career choice. A sample item is "finding the line of work that I am best suited for." The Establishment scale measures the effort the individual makes to express his or her self-concept in an occupational role. A sample item is "settling down in a job I can stay with." In the current study, both the Exploration and Establishments scales had high reliability ([alpha] = .95).
Demographics. Along with the CTCQ and the ACCI, each participant completed a demographics form that elicited information about sex, age, ethnicity, degree currently pursued and program area of study.
Results
To examine the first research question "What specific career tasks (CTCQ) and career stages (ACCI) are of concern to counselor trainees," frequencies were computed on each scale. Scales were categorized based on participant responses. For each scale of the CTCQ, the following response categories were used for this analysis: 1 = no importance, 2 = little importance, 3 = some importance, 4 = considerable importance, and 5 = great importance. A student who reported a score of 1 (no importance) for every item on a scale was identified as having "no concerns." Students who reported a score of 4 (considerable importance) on the majority of questions, with at least one question that was reported as a 5 (great importance), were categorized as having "great concerns." Students who reported 2 (little importance) or 3 (some importance) on the majority of the items on a scale were categorized as having "little/some concerns," while students who reported 2 or 3 (little importance or some importance) but reported 4 (considerable importance) on a greater number of questions were categorized as having "considerable concerns." A similar method of coding was used for the ACCI in computing (a) no concerns, (b) little/some concerns, (c) considerable concerns, and (d) great concerns.
To analyze the second research question, "Are there differences in career tasks and career stage concerns between community and school counseling master's students," we used an independent t test. The entire scale and subscale scores of the CTCQ and the ACCI were used to examine the differences. To examine Research Question 3, we used a stepwise regression to explore relations between personal characteristics and career stage concerns (as measured by the ACCI) and overall career task concerns (as measured by the CTCQ). For this analysis, we used the entire continuous scales.
Overall Career Task Concerns and Career Stages
Over half of the counselor trainees reported considerable importance to great importance for overall career task concerns. With regard to career stage, the majority of counselor trainees reported a high level of concern for exploring information about themselves as well as possible occupations. Participants also reported a high level of concern for establishment stage tasks (see Table 1).
Frequency of career task concerns. The majority of students reported that overall career task concerns were of considerable importance (45.4%) to great importance (25%), with 30% of the sample reporting that they were of little/some importance (see Table 1). There were no counselors trainees reporting that career task concerns were of no importance. When examining specific career task concerns, more than half of the students in the current sample reported that professional development concerns (82.9%) and adjustment concerns (62.5%) had considerable to great importance. However, when examining job-search concerns, almost the entire sample reported that they were of little/some importance (89.5%), with no master's-level students reporting great concern for this area. Finally, when examining academia concerns, no students reported that finding information about the world of academia and faculty positions was of no importance to them. However, approximately half of the students (53.9%) reported little/some importance, whereas nearly half (46%) reported considerable importance to great importance on the Academia Concerns subscale.
Frequency of career stage concerns. Almost half of the students in the current sample reported having "great concern" as indicated in their responses on the Exploration and Establishment scales of the ACCI (48.7% and 44.7%, respectively; see Table 1). When examining program tracks separately, similar percentages of students reported having comparable levels of concern in all areas.
Differences Among Community and School Counseling Graduate Students
We used independent t tests to examine differences in career task and career stage concerns between community and school counseling graduate students. However, no significant differences were found between participants in the two program tracks on any overall career task concerns (t = -1.25, p > .05), career exploration concerns (t = -1.00, p > .05), or career establishment concerns (t = .71, p > .05). No significant differences between community and school counseling graduate students were found regarding responses on the career task subscales of the CTCQ.
Career Stage Concerns and Demographic Factors Related to Career Task Concerns
Hierarchical regression analysis was used to investigate the degree to which counselor trainees' self-reported career task concerns and demographic variables could be explained by Super's career stages. Demographic variables were entered first in the regression as a set to control for their effects. Next, the scores on the ACCI scales (i.e., Exploration and Establishment) were entered to examine the amount of variance they explained for career task concerns. Table 2 reports the results of the regression analysis.
When examining demographic factors in Model 1, sex, age, and master's program track were not significantly related to career task concerns. Ethnicity, however, was significantly and positively related ([beta] = .255, p < .01), suggesting that Caucasian students reported lower levels of career task concerns than did minority students. The Model 1 explained 6.3% of the variance in career task concerns.
Model 2 included the addition of the Exploration and Establishment scales of the ACCI. This model explained 31.1% of the variance in career task concerns. This is a difference in adjusted [R.sup.2] of .252. In Model 2, ethnicity was the only demographic variable to be significantly related to career task concerns, [beta] = .16, p < .05 (see Table 2). Scores on both the Exploration and Establishment scales were positively related to overall career task concerns ([beta] = .15, p > .05; [beta] = .40, p < .001, respectively); however, the Establishment scale score was the only variable statistically significantly related to career task concerns.
FEED