TPC Journal-Vol 11-Issue-3 - FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 11, Issue 3 331 Data Analysis To address our first research question, we used descriptive statistics to examine the prevalence of training among the participants. We used analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) to detect differences in both suicide assessment self-efficacy (CSAES scores) and workplace anxiety (WAS scores) while controlling for years of school counseling experience between school counselors who were exposed to student suicide and those who were not. We considered exposure to deaths by suicide and exposure to suicide attempts as different types of exposure. Therefore, we performed a total of four ANCOVAs: (a) differences in CSAES scores between school counselors exposed to deaths by suicide and those not exposed, (b) differences in CSAES scores between school counselors exposed to suicide attempts and those not exposed, (c) differences in WAS scores between school counselors exposed to deaths by suicide and those not exposed, and (d) differences in WAS scores between school counselors exposed to suicide attempts and those not exposed. We also used analysis of variance (ANOVA) to determine the difference in years of school counseling experience between those exposed to suicide and those not exposed. To determine the relationship between the number of suicide exposures and counselor suicide assessment self-efficacy, we also completed two partial correlations between the number of exposures to student death by suicide and CSAES scores, and the number of exposures to student suicide attempts and CSAES scores. Results A total of 64 school counselors reported that they experienced a student death by suicide during their school counseling experience (28.3%), with a mean of 2.11 deaths (SD = 2.21). On average, their first suicide death was 6.72 years ago (SD = 5.87), and the most recent suicide death was 3.84 years ago (SD = 3.88). A total of 124 participants experienced a student suicide attempt during their school counseling experience (54.9%), with a mean of 5.36 attempts (SD = 10.54). On average, the first suicide attempt was 5.91 years ago (SD = 6.07), and the most recent attempt was 1.82 years ago (SD = 2.10). Of all 226 school counselors, 195 worked in schools that have crisis plans (86.3%), and 170 worked in schools that have crisis teams (75.2%). Suicide Training Regarding suicide prevention training during their graduate program, 140 (62%) received some training, but 86 (38%) received no training. Regarding crisis intervention training during their graduate program, 142 (63%) received some, but 84 (37%) received none. Regarding suicide postvention, only 87 (38.5%) received some, but 139 (61.5%) received none. The number of postgraduate training hours varied widely for each preparation type. For suicide prevention, training hours averaged 12.20 (SD = 28.61); for crisis intervention, training hours averaged 9.04 (SD = 15.51); and for suicide postvention, training hours averaged 6.45 (SD = 18.14). We removed one participant’s postgraduate training data that was more than 3 standard deviations higher than the mean. In order to better illustrate the distribution of postgraduate training hours, we grouped the number of training hours into four categories: 0 hours, 1–10 hours, 11–50 hours, and more than 50 hours of postgraduate training. Nearly a quarter of the participants (24.3%) received no postgraduate training in suicide prevention, about a third of the participants (30.5%) received no postgraduate training in crisis intervention, and half (50.4%) received no postgraduate training in suicide postvention. To further demonstrate the disparity of suicide training, cross-tabulation was performed between graduate training and the number of postgraduate training hours. We reported this data in Table 1. Most surprisingly, 25 school counselors (11.1%) received no graduate training in suicide prevention, nor any postgraduate hours of training in suicide prevention; another 45 (19.9%) received no graduate training and only 10 or fewer hours of postgraduate training in suicide prevention, making

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