TPC-Journal-V2-Issue2

The Professional Counselor \Volume 2, Issue 2 162 listed on webpages or they were not. Essential information might contain additional contents that reviewers needed to count the accessible numbers. For example, one program webpage could list seven full-time faculty members, but it only provided three links to access three faculty’s publication records. In this case, there would be a “7” on the faculty count and a “3” on faculty publication. Data Analysis Process As explained in the procedure and methods section, two types of data were eventually collected in the review process. A set of nominal data was generated from reviewers’ examination on common headlines or essential information in webpage contents. The nominal data was coded as “0” and “1” to represent whether or not one headline or information existed on a particular webpage. For example, when reviewers were able to see the mailing address on one webpage, they would mark a “1” on the category of program mailing address. Nominal data could be tallied for total numbers. Another set of data was the interval data acquired by counting the numbers listed under one category. A total of 28 major categories were compiled by reviewers. A careful examination of these 28 categories allowed researchers to group them into three content domains: program, faculty, and students. Each of the three domains contained a number of categories delivering essential information for that domain. For example, the program domain would contain categories such as mailing address, e-mail address, and mission, which all related to what the program was about. Based on the different qualities of the two data types and the purposes of this study, a descriptive analysis (Creswell, 2008) was selected to describe the data sets. This procedure was used to depict the content quality of the webpages of CACREP-accredited counseling programs and reveal what could be the deficient areas on program webpages. Results The review process was able to access 220 program webpages (84%) from a list of 262 departments offering at least one CACREP-accredited counseling program. These 220 departmental webpages contained information for 528 CACREP-accredited counseling programs (88.9%) from 594 programs listed on CACREP directory. A total of 28 categories carrying the essential information were labeled. These categories were grouped into three domains of program, faculty and student based on the types of information presented in the categories. The program domain consisted of categorical information about the counseling program. Information in a program domain aimed to introduce a counseling program to prospective users. The faculty domain contained categorical information aimed to introduce counselor educators to prospective users. The student domain consisted of categorical information which counseling programs provided for prospective and current students, as well as alumni. Figure 1 represents the results of our investigation on the essential information published on all accessible webpages of CACREP-accredited counseling programs. The data in Figure 1 indicated whether or not a type of essential information was displayed on program webpages and the numbers of counseling programs actually displaying the essential information.