TPC-Journal-V2-Issue2

The Professional Counselor \Volume 2, Issue 2 161 of counseling programs’ webpages as online marketing tools and conducted a review of webpages for 187 CACREP- accredited counseling programs. Their results indicated various deficiencies, such as missing CACREP accreditation information. This study reviewed the webpages of all CACREP-accredited counseling programs in order to examine the essential published information and to explore possible deficiencies which may prevent these webpages from being effective marketing tools for prospective students. Method CACREPWebpages All CACREP-accredited counseling programs listed on the CACREP directory page (CACREP, n.d.) were used in this study. It was important to point out that one counseling department could house multiple accredited counseling programs; hence these counseling programs would share the departmental webpages. Few universities had multiple campuses where independent counseling programs were operating. The review criteria was to count each set of webpages for one content review even though there might be two or three accredited counseling programs sharing the same departmental webpages. Counseling programs in different campuses were counted separately when they were listed as different accredited programs on the CACREP directory. A total number of 220 departmental webpages were reviewed. Within these 220 departments, researchers reviewed webpage contents covering 528 CACREP-accredited counseling programs. There were 42 institutions with 66 CACREP- accredited programs not accessible either from the CACREP directory list or the main institutional webpages. During the research process, multiple attempts to access the webpages of these 66 counseling programs had failed, and these programs were subsequently excluded from this study. Procedure A list of CACREP-accredited programs was retrieved from the CACREP directory page (CACREP, n.d.) during the 2009–2010 academic years. This directory provided links to all CACREP program webpages. When the links on the directory were not accurate or up-to-date, online search engines, including Google and Yahoo, were used to access program webpages. This route took researchers to the institutional webpages or the departmental webpages. In some cases, researchers were able to find the counseling program webpages through institutional or departmental webpages. Some program webpages were not able to be located after multiple attempts. Two graduate students were trained as webpage reviewers. They went over a couple of webpages with researchers to become familiar with the process of reviewing webpage contents and determining the major content categories. One reviewer took an academic semester to examine all program webpages. The first reviewer began with the contents of several program webpages to create a list of major content categories from those webpages. This reviewer then presented the categories, such as “program mission” and “current student,” to the researchers. The category presentation was held to verify the efficiency and accuracy of the reviewer. Throughout the review process, the reviewer remained in constant communication with researchers and discussed unclear webpage contents with researchers to determine how to categorize such contents. The second reviewer followed the exact same links to review all CACREP program webpages independently and she compared her review results with those of the first reviewer to verify the accuracy of the recorded data. The second reviewer took another academic semester to complete this task. Both reviewers continued to access the program webpages with broken links on CACREP directory. They tried to locate these webpages through the institutional and departmental webpages. Those inaccessible webpages of counseling programs were excluded from this study. The major content categories were determined on those common webpage headlines and information grouped in sections or links for prospective users. The common headlines included topics such as program mission and program description. Essential information included sections such as program contact information and the links for current students or faculty and staff. Many universal terms, such as mission and department contact, were used across the majority of program webpages. When reviewers encountered webpage contents they were not certain about how to categorize, they brought these contents to discuss with researchers in order to determine the categories for these contents. Reviewers were counting what common headlines were published on any given program webpages. Either these common headlines were