TPC Journal V7, Issue 2 - FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 7, Issue 2 193 Three sections comprised the survey: (a) questions about participants’ demography, (b) one Likert scale question asking about the participant’s clarity in consistently identifying professionally as a counselor, and (c) an open text box asking participants to respond to the prompt: “Please write below how you describe your occupational role as a professional counselor to others (clients, other professionals, and the public).” The demographic variables included the following: gender identity, age, all licenses held with a state licensure board, year of graduation from master’s counseling program, current employment setting, and ethnicity and race. One Likert scale question asked about the participant’s professional identity: “I am consistently clear in my language with clients, other professionals, and the public that I am a counselor (as opposed to saying I am a psychotherapist, therapist, etc.).” Participants responding “Never Clear” scored a 0 and those responding “Always Clear” scored a 5. Data Analysis Procedures We performed several data analysis procedures. First, structural coding allowed for the creation of categories that summarize the different formulas used by independently licensed counselors to talk about their profession with others (Saldaña, 2013). Additionally, it allowed for the detection of the number of individual participants who endorsed each formula. We first analyzed the data using structural coding separately, and then we reevaluated the data simultaneously to check for agreement. In the separate analyses, we each found that all 472 responses naturally categorized into six different formulas. We then re-reviewed our separate analyses jointly and found complete agreement. After utilizing structural coding, we re-analyzed the data using magnitude coding (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Magnitude coding adds a symbol (such as a number or character) to existing code to indicate the code’s intensity, direction or valuation (Saldaña, 2013). We used magnitude coding to add a numeric value to the six formulas with 0 denoting the formula with the least amount of counselor professional identity to 5 denoting the formula with the greatest amount of counselor professional identity. Further, we performed structural coding again within each of the six main formulas to create sub-formulas that would further explain nuances found within each of the six main formulas. We separately analyzed sub-formulas for each of the six formulas. Later, we reevaluated the results simultaneously to check for agreement. We found that there were four sub-formulas within each of the six main formulas. Magnitude coding was performed by adding a numeric value to the four sub- formulas generated in this study, with a value of “a” denoting the formula with the least amount of counselor professional identity to a value of “d” denoting the formula with the greatest amount of counselor professional identity. Hence, a participant rated as a 5d demonstrated the greatest amount of counselor professional identity, and a participant rated as a 0a demonstrated the least amount of counselor professional identity (Table 1). Further, a participant rated as a 1d demonstrated more counselor professional identity than a participant rated as a 1c. Next, we used descriptive statistics to explore survey responses from independently licensed counselors using a mail survey design (Fink & Kosecoff, 1998; Heppner, Kivlighan, & Wampold, 1992) to understand our study subjects better. Additionally, we used descriptive statistics to see how closely participants’ ratings of their expressions of professional identity matched our ratings of their professional identity statements. To determine if ratings improved with more recent graduates, we ran a Mann-Whitney U test to see if our ratings varied by participant date of graduation from their master’s