TPC Journal-Vol 11-Issue-1

62 The Professional Counselor | Volume 11, Issue 1 TPC —Counseling the Military and Their Families (Volume 4, Issue 2); Counseling and the DSM-5 (4.3); School Counseling (4.5); Counseling Children With Special Needs and Circumstances (5.2); and School Counselors and a Multi-Tiered System of Supports: Cultivating Systemic Change and Equitable Outcomes (6.3)—along with one special section (Counselor Education and Supervision [5.1]). To date, no qualitative syntheses of TPC content have been published in TPC . Qualitative syntheses are usually conducted by a scholar with expertise in qualitative analysis and provide an in-depth scholarly treatise of the content published by a journal. This current article is the first meta-study of TPC content. A meta-study involves conducting a quantitative review and trend analysis of patterns found within the published literature. Quantitative meta-studies typically include an analysis of the author and article characteristics, as well as the use of descriptive and univariate statistical procedures in order to identify trends over time within the characteristics analyzed. These studies can be as narrowly focused as a single journal or topic or can span across multiple journals focusing on specific concepts. Quantitative meta-studies have the advantage of allowing objective, numerical, statistical analysis of changing trends across a large variety of variables using hypothesis testing to determine statistical significance and effect sizes. This quantitative meta-study focused on the scholarly content of TPC from the first nine volumes (2011– 2019) and attempted to answer two basic questions: (a) What is published within The Professional Counselor (article characteristics), particularly with regard to research? and (b) Who publishes in The Professional Counselor (author characteristics)? These questions are also analyzed for trends to determine changes occurring in journal characteristics over time. Method Mirroring the methods of Saks et al. (2020), all articles published from 2011 through 2019 in TPC were examined, analyzed, and coded to describe article and author characteristics in order to answer the primary research questions of who and what is published in TPC and how those characteristics have changed over time. This systematic approach also allowed comparisons of these variable displays across journals. Scholarly contributions were accepted into the analysis while less scholarly works were rejected and not included in the analysis (e.g., editorials, introductions to special issues, biographies, profiles). Identified author characteristics included the number of authors, name, gender, and employment setting of all authors, and university and domicile (national or international) of the lead author. Identified article characteristics included type of article (i.e., expository/other and research), topical content (e.g., professional issues, symptoms/disorders, technique/theory, multicultural issues), and focus (i.e., research or not research). Additional characteristics were identified specifically in research articles. These research characteristics included: intervention or nonintervention; research paradigm (i.e., quantitative or qualitative); type of research design (i.e., qualitative, true or quasi- experimental, test development, descriptive/survey, comparative, correlational, meta-analysis/ other); use of random or nonrandom sampling/assignment procedures; types of participants (i.e., adults, counselors/providers, youth, undergraduate students, graduate students or counselor trainees, nonhuman); sample size; sample size category (i.e., small, medium, large, or very large); sophistication of statistical applications (basic, intermediate, or advanced); primary statistical analyses used (i.e., descriptive, correlation, regression analysis, t -test/ANOVA/ANCOVA, nonparametric, MANOVA/MANCOVA, factor analysis); and inclusion of sample effect size estimate, reliability, and validity as indicators of quantitative reporting standards. Qualitative designs (e.g., grounded theory, phenomenological, case study) were further disaggregated and analyzed.