TPC Journal-Vol 11-Issue-1

The Professional Counselor | Volume 11, Issue 1 69 research labs must generalize to implementation in the field; studies conducted in the field already have bridged that gap. Melding field-based innovations, counseling research, and practitioner voices will help the counseling profession evolve into a more evidence-based practice accountable to, and valued by, clients and other stakeholders. Article Characteristics: What Is Published in TPC ? Over the first 9 years of TPC publications, articles were quite well balanced over a broad range of topical content (see Table 1). When combined, over one-third of the articles focused primarily on three topics: counselor education/training (16.4%), multicultural issues (10.3%), and school counseling (10.3%). However, an appropriate and even spread of topic coverage was observed in the other areas, ranging from a low of 3.2% for identity development to 8.4% for health/wellness. Thus, the TPC editorial board is approving a broad swath of important and meaningful topical content for the readership of TPC . It will be important to maintain this balance in the decade ahead as TPC fulfills its goal as a journal of value to all professional counselors, regardless of work setting and counseling sub-discipline. Research articles are critical components of professional journals. Research articles form the scientific foundation of a profession, and the more we know about the clients we serve, the better prepared we are to serve them. At 58.1%, the proportion of research studies published in TPC is typical when compared with other counseling journals, most of which are in the range of 50%–68%, including Counseling and Values: Spirituality, Ethics, and Religion in Counseling (Alder et al., in press); the Journal of LGBT Issues in Counseling (Gayowsky et al., in press); the Journal of Mental Health Counseling (Menzies et al., 2020); and Adultspan (Rippeto et al., in press). The proportion of research studies in TPC is albeit far lower than the more research-focused counseling journals like Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development (80.7%; Saks et al, 2020), Counseling Outcome Research and Evaluation (75.6%; Johnson et al., 2021), the Journal of Employment Counseling (86.4%; Siegler et al., in press), and Counselor Education & Supervision (90.4%; Johnsen et al., in press) produced during the 2015–2019 time window. Still, TPC has made great inroads in the proportion of research articles published in its first decade, and it will be interesting to see where this trajectory will lead in the next decade. The research designs used in TPC research studies are heavily weighted toward non-experimental designs, including descriptive or survey (42.4%), qualitative (18.4%), and correlational (18.4%) designs (see Table 2). Descriptive/survey research simply seeks to describe the characteristics of participants and their interactions or performance on variables. True- and quasi-experimental designs appeared in only 4.4% of all TPC research articles, which is a low rate among the family of counseling journals. At the same time, the 12.3% proportion of intervention-focused articles is quite good when compared to other counselor journals (Menzies et al., 2020), as Ray et al. (2011) reported that only about 6% of all research articles published in counseling journals focus on the efficacy of interventions. Intervention research studies tend to be among the most valuable studies published in the counseling profession because intervention studies inform the reader on what efficacy counselors can expect when implementing the intervention with clients or students. Thus, intervention studies help inform us about what we know that works in counseling. In summary, TPC should strive to increase the proportion of intervention articles, as well as true- and quasi-experimental designs, as these approaches help counselors understand what works in counseling related to the effectiveness of counseling practice. True- and quasi-experimental designs also enhance generalizability of sample results to the population, which gives counselors confidence that the more robust experimental results from these studies are more applicable to the broader populations of clients served by counselors.