TPC-Journal-V2-Issue1

40 The Professional Counselor \Volume 2, Issue 1 Specifically, the local media should be utilized to portray positive messages about professional counselors and benefits of service utilization. Local news media frequently look for short stories or opinions from human service professionals on various topics. This particularly is true around holidays or other special occasions—or even traumatic events—when media generate special interest stories. Local television specials can be powerful mediums for perception formation among families and potential clients. Universities with communication arts programs can budget monies for student and/ or professionally generated DVDs that highlight and promote professional counselors as quality options during times of personal need. The same advocacy can occur with school newspapers, web sites, circulars, and other sources of “common knowledge.” Respondents from the present study indicated that media is a powerful source and influences their perceptions. Professional counselors, therefore, should seize this medium—using it to generate reoccurring positive messages. Respondents also told us that parental opinions, former clients, information from friends, and other word of mouth sources were important in how they came to think of professional counselors. There is little that counselors can do to encourage positive word of mouth advertising for professional counselors. However, they can utilize the media to its fullest. On both macro and micro levels, we are concerned about professional counselors’ general tendencies towards passivity. That is, counselors presently are at the mercy of how happenstance may occur in clients’ lives to formulate perceptions of counselors. Rather, counselors should architect how they want potential clients to think about them. Draft the message and then market it through public service announcements, movies, the media, and other sources that consumers say are important to their concept formations. In short, be proactive rather than laissez-faire on this important matter. Limitations and Future Research We believe the present research study provided an apt representation of the students interviewed. However, as with all qualitative research, external validity is a limitation. That is, while replication is important for quantitative research (Cumming, 2005), qualitative research is particularly context dependent, relying on replication ultimately to prove its generalizability (Firmin, 2006b). In this light, we are limited in our ability to apply the present findings to all students at all universities in the United States or the public in general. Further research should replicate this study, assessing students and potential clients in varying parts of the country. Further, national survey data should be collected—providing more breadth to our present findings—although, of course, breadth and depth acquisitions tend to be methodological tradeoffs. No minority representation was included in the present sample. Of course they were not deliberately excluded; rather, the general psychology class from which the sample was drawn contained only a few minority students. By random sample chance they were not included. As previously indicated, we used random sampling of the students in the study in order to enhance external validity as much as possible. The university from which the sample was taken contains only a 6% total minority population. Consequently, further research should be conducted in this area, possessing greater numbers of minority students in those samples. Also, replicating the present qualitative study with all minority students would provide an interesting comparison to the present findings from a Caucasian sample. In sum, we believe that the present study has powerful heuristic value. Researchers should take this concept and develop it much further than what we were able to do in the present design. Assuming that professional counseling is going to develop and flourish in the upcoming decades, then the call we make for proactive advocacy must be heard. Students and the public have perceptions of professional counselors. That simply is a fact of human nature. It behooves the professional counselor leaders as well as individual counselors to craft what they wish those perceptions to be. References Atkinson, P., Coffey, A., & Delamont, S. (2003). Key themes in qualitative research . New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield.