TPC-Journal-V1-Issue1

The Professional Counselor \ Volume 1, Issue 1 79 incentives/bribes for participation (Storms & Loosveldt, 2004), it was taken from a single locale. Some compensation exists, such as students coming from 34 states and the relatively broad cross-section of college majors represented. However, future research in this domain should assess students from a wider variety of institutions such as research universities, state universities, and liberal arts colleges—as well as from diverse locales in the country in order to enhance the study’s external validity (Cohen & Wenner, 2006). Second, our study had relatively low representation from minority students. This simply was an artifact of the university where the data was collected. Specifically, minorities comprised only 6% of the student body population. Further research should contain samples with larger representations of minority individuals. Additionally, replicating this present study with all minority students would provide an interesting comparison among many points of investigation. Third, some of the items queried were selected a priori. While we believe them to be of interest and germane to our purposes, future research should broaden questionnaires to include questions that are derived empirically from the research literature. Also, organizations such as the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs should provide input vis-a-vis questions that directly would enhance their efforts in counselor education preparation. The same is true with potential input from NBCC and ACA as they market professional counselors to the general population as well as college students. Fourth, in retrospect there are two particular changes we would have made to the survey instrument. One is that we would have added a Likert-scale to the first question, querying the perceived overall effectiveness of counselors. While we believe that rating professional counselors with three choices was useful—and we would keep the question—we also would recommend future researchers add a Likert-scale question that is anchored with descriptions, but to which numeric interval-scale values could be assessed. Second, looking back on our questionnaire, we would have asked how many students saw more than one HSP. That is, did they use more than one type of human service professional’s services (e.g., they saw both a rehabilitation counselor and a school counselor). Accounting for multiple uses within the same clientele could provide potentially useful data. Future research should take the present study and apply it to the population in general. That is, we produced what we believe to be fairly apt representations of perceptions among students—but they do not represent the population at large. Obviously, college students have unique features of adult development that are not necessarily shared by older adults (Foos & Clark, 2003). The very low reported influence that health insurance companies have on college students’ perceptions is one of many examples of where student ideations and those of more middle-aged adults might differ. And finally, qualitative research is needed in this area. A prime value of questionnaires, such as the present one, is that more voluminous amounts of data can be collected—providing breadth of understanding (Gall & Borg, 2003). Such research also tends to answer “how many” or “what” types of questions (Hittleman & Simon, 2003). Thicker descriptions are needed to help flesh-out some of the details on which survey research was only able to skim. Answers to some of the “why” and “how” questions that the present findings raise can best be answered with follow-up qualitative research methodology (Flick, 2002). References Cohen, J., & Wenner, C. J. (2006, May). Convenience at a cost: College student samples. Poster presented at the annual convention of the Association for Psychological Science, New York, NY. Eriksen, K. P., & McAuliffe, G. J. (1999). Toward a constructivist and developmental identity of the counseling profession: The context-phase-state-style model. Journal of Counseling & Development, 77 , 267–280. Fall, K. A., Levitov, J. E., & Eberts, S. (2000). The public perception of mental health professions: An empirical examination. Journal of Mental Health Counseling. 22 , 122–134. Farberman, R. K. (1997). Public attitudes about psychologists and mental health care: Research to guide the American Psychological Association public education campaign. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 28 , 128–136. Foos, P. W., & Clark, M. C. (2003). Human aging. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.