TPC-Journal-V4-Issue1

88 The Professional Counselor \Volume 4, Issue 1 dynamic, specialized, assertive, personal, practical, resilient, facilitator, personal therapy, strategic and consultant. Consensually, the researchers separated these concepts into semantic categories, taking into account terms that are synonyms or that have a very similar meaning, leaving 57 definitions. Similarly, those concepts with more semantic weight were detected, resulting in the Semantic Association Memory (SAM) group according to Valdez (2010), which refers to the 15 categories with the most relevance (M total). This process is done considering frequency and weight. This group includes 17 categories since the last 3 present the same value. Table 1 shows terms that counseling students used to define counselor identity, weighted in order of relevance. Table 1 Counseling Students’ Identity Semantic Defining Categories VMT FMG Empathic, understands, sensitive 76 100% Ethical 52 68.42% Honest, sincere, fair 52 68.42% Prepared, knowledge, updated, trained 44 57.89% Flexible, adapts 43 56.57% Support, help, backup 35 46.05% Listening 33 43.42% Warm, human 32 42.10% Congruence, authentic 29 38.15% Mental health, well-being 25 32.89% Trustable 25 32.89% Integrative 23 30.26% Responsible, commitment 21 27.64% Intervening, implementing, action 17 22.36% Professionalism 16 21.05% Respect, tolerance 16 21.05% Multicultural, contextualized, diversity 16 21.05% Note. VMT = Total M Value; FMG = semantic distance between the defining words. For graduated professional counselors, the defining terms for the stimulus counselor professional identity , listed in the order of frequency with which participants used and ranked them, were as follows: empathic, commitment, dedicated, responsible, ethical, serves vulnerable populations, social service, prepared, experienced, updated, supervised, studious, research, listening, authentic, genuine, congruent, support, assistance, orientation, guidance, honesty, integrity, integrative,