TPC-Journal-V5-Issue1

The Professional Counselor /Volume 5, Issue 1 187 acknowledged that “a limited amount of research focusing on counselor education doctoral students has been conducted” (Protivnak & Foss, 2009, p. 240). Purpose of the Study The purpose of this study was to determine which variables are most influential in predicting counseling doctoral students’ and recent graduates’ overall satisfaction with their dissertation chairperson. Throughout the literature, terms such as advisor, chair and chairperson have been utilized; for the purpose of this study, the term chairperson is used. The research questions for this study included the following: (a) What selection criteria, if any, predict doctoral students’ and recent graduates’ overall satisfaction with their chairperson? and (b) What chairperson behaviors, if any, predict doctoral students’ and recent graduates’ overall satisfaction with their chairperson? Method Participants and Procedures Counselor education doctoral students who had successfully proposed their dissertation and counselor education graduates who had defended their dissertation within 24 months of the date of the study were invited to participate. A survey instrument, designed by the first author using previous literature and a qualitative grounded theory pilot study, was posted on SurveyMonkey. Emails were distributed to CACREP-accredited department chairs and an invitation to participate was posted on CESNET, the counselor education listserv. The number of potential participants who fit the above criteria is unknown. A priori power analysis was conducted to determine the number of participants needed. Assuming a medium effect size of .05 at Power = .80, 91 participants were needed to successfully complete the survey (Cohen, 1992). After an 8-week period, 133 participants completed the survey, with 122 protocols valid and used for analysis. Participant characteristics. Demographic information from the 122 participants was summarized and examined. Ages ranged from 26–63 years, with a mean age of 37. Ninety-one participants identified as female, 29 as male and one as transgender, and one declined to answer. The majority of participants identified as White (72 %) or African American (18%), with a small percentage identifying as Asian American (1.6%), Hispanic (2.5%), Native American (1.6%), and biracial (1.6%). Of the 122 participants, 42% were counselor education graduates and 58% were counselor education doctoral candidates. Lastly, 107 (88%) participants indicated that they had selected their chairperson and 15 (12%) indicated that their chairperson had been assigned to them. Instrumentation The survey instrument, developed in a qualitative pilot study, consisted of four sections: demographic items, participant selection criteria (e.g., is doing research similar to my dissertation topic), chairperson behaviors (e.g. provided effective feedback on my dissertation work) and participants’ overall satisfaction with their dissertation chairperson (e.g. overall, how satisfied were you with your dissertation chairperson?). An informed consent agreement appeared at the beginning of the survey and participants were required to confirm their consent in order to proceed to the overall survey. Item generation. Survey items were developed based on the aforementioned qualitative pilot study. Grounded theory and axial coding were used to derive key themes used in conjunction with prominent themes from existing literature (Bair & Haworth, 2004; Gardner, 2009; Goulden, 1991; Kritsonis & Marshall, 2008; Lovitts, 2001; Zhao et al., 2007) in order to develop survey instrument items for the major constructs. These constructs were as follows: selection criteria used by doctoral students when choosing a dissertation chairperson (selection criteria); behaviors exhibited by the chairperson throughout the dissertation process (behaviors); and