Volume_7_Issue_2_Digest

12 TPC Digest A s inequities exist for independently licensed counselors, there has been much discussion about counselor professional identity along with many attempts by various counseling constituencies to address this critical issue. We investigated how independently licensed counselors expressed their role as a professional counselor to others and evaluated their consistency in expressing a counselor professional identity. Results demonstrated that independently licensed counselors rarely accurately self-evaluate their occupational role communications. As 56% of the participants rated themselves with the two highest ratings on the scale, it would seem that counselor professional identity is not a serious issue. However, when we evaluated participants’ narratives about their occupational role, we placed only 29% of counselors in the two highest formulas. As 54% of participants never used the term counselor or counseling when discussing their occupational role with others, the continued concerns about counselor professional identity are warranted. Researchers have reported that counselors naturally distinguish the counseling profession from other mental health professions by being grounded in a developmental, preventive and wellness orientation despite practicing in different counseling subspecialties. It would appear that the profession and its members have agreement on the counseling profession’s distinct hallmarks of prevention, advocacy, wellness, empowerment and normal human development. However, results from our study indicated that only 11% of participants alluded to one or more of the counseling profession’s distinct hallmarks when articulating their occupational role to others. It does not appear that independently licensed counselors are communicating how the counseling profession’s unique values and philosophy shape their professional practice. Clearly, the American Counseling Association Code of Ethics, the National Counselor Examination for Licensure and Certification, and the 2016 Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Evaluating Independently Licensed Counselors’ Articulation of Professional Identity Using Structural Coding Stephanie Burns, Daniel R. Cruikshanks