TPC-Journal-V6-Issue2

The Professional Counselor /Volume 6, Issue 2 182 may hold. One participant said, “You never know what the client is going to come in with,” arguing that career counselors have to be open to multiple sources of intervention by necessity. Another participant indicated that she wished she could rely more on multiple sources of intervention but that the specialized nature of her office constricted her ability to do so. Participants on this factor cited a lack of awareness or skills as a barrier to their implementing more advocacy behaviors. They were quick to identify social justice as a natural concern of career counselors and one that career counselors are well qualified to address due to their ability to remain aware of personal, mental health and career-related concerns simultaneously. One participant said: I don’t know if the profession of career counseling is really seen as being as great as it is in that most of us have counseling backgrounds and can really tackle the issues of career on a number of different levels. In talking about the nature of career counseling, another participant said, “Social justice impacts work in so many ways. It would make sense for those external barriers to come into our conversations.” Regarding collaborating with other professionals to prepare convincing rationales for social change, one participant stated that there are already enough rationales for social change; therefore, this advocacy behavior was seen as less important to her. Persons on this factor placed relatively higher importance on valuing feedback on advocacy efforts than did participants on factor one. One participant said she would like to seek feedback more often but had not thought of doing so in a while: “I did this more when I was in graduate school because you are thinking about your thinking all the time. As a practitioner, as long as social justice and advocacy are on my radar, that’s good.” Discussion Neither setting nor gender appeared to differentiate the factors, but age and years of post-master’s experience may have been distinguishing variables. Younger individuals and those with fewer years of post-master’s experience tended to load onto factor two. Factor one had an average age of 51 compared to 35 for factor two, and the average age for all study participants was 43. It is interesting to note that the four participants who loaded onto both factors and were therefore dropped from analysis had an average of just over two years of post-master’s counseling experience versus 11 for factor one and seven for factor two. It is possible that their more recent training regarding advocacy may account for some differences in perspective from those of more experienced counselors. Participants on factor one (focus on clients) who emphasized the importance of individual clients tended to perceive it as more difficult to have conversations about social justice with their peers or supervisors. In contrast, participants on factor two (focus on multiple roles) were more likely to cite a lack of knowledge or skills regarding their reasons for not engaging in more advocacy behaviors beyond the client level. Factor arrays indicated that factor one participants viewed engaging at the community level as more important, whereas participants on factor two viewed conversations with colleagues and clients about social justice as more important to their work. The broader view of persons on factor two regarding the career counselor’s role and their openness to acknowledging their own lack of awareness or skills may reflect a different kind of socialization around advocacy compared to persons on factor one. Career counselors who graduated from counseling programs prior to the emphasis on multicultural competence in the early 1990s or