TheProfessional Counselor-Vol12-Issue3

The Professional Counselor | Volume 12, Issue 3 211 Community agencies working with this client population should also consider providing counselors with professional development and training related to SFBT. It is important to mention that when two of us were in graduate programs, we did not receive formal SFBT instruction. This might be due to greater emphasis on humanistic and cognitive behavioral therapies in counseling curricula or among some counselor education faculty. As a result, counselor educators must make a cogent effort to promote and discuss postmodern theories such as SFBT. This is important because SFBT can be effective at improving internalizing disorders among clients (Schmit et al., 2016) and Latine populations (Gonzalez & Franklin, 2016). Another implication for counselor educators is to consider teaching CITs how to use SCRDs to monitor and assess treatment effectiveness. All counseling interns who work in a community counseling clinic need to demonstrate the effectiveness of their services with clients. Therefore, CITs can learn how to use SCRDs or a single-group pretest/posttest with clinical significance (Ikonomopoulos et al., 2021; Lenz, 2020b) to determine the impact of counseling on client outcomes. Finally, community counseling clinics can consider using the DHS and OQ-45.2 to measure indicators of subjective well-being and clinical symptoms. CITs can use these instruments, which have evidence of reliability and validity with culturally diverse populations, to document the impact of their counseling services on clients’ hope and clinical symptoms. Implications for Practitioners There also are implications for practitioners. First, counselors can use SFBT principles and techniques to work with Latine clients. By using a positive and future-oriented framework, counselors can build a positive therapeutic relationship and help Latine clients construct a positive future. Counselors can use SFBT to help Latine clients identify how familismo is a source of strength (Oliver et al., 2011) and draw on their inner resiliency (Vela et al., 2015) to create their preferred future outcome. Practitioners can use SFBT techniques, including looking for previous solutions, exceptions, the miracle question, scaling questions, compliments, and future-oriented questions. SFBT principles and techniques can be used to facilitate hope by helping Latine clients view mental health challenges as opportunities to cultivate strengths and explore solutions (Bannik, 2008; Joubert & Guse, 2021). Practitioners also can use SCRDs to evaluate the impact of their work with clients. Although most practitioners collect pre- and post-counseling intervention data, they typically use a single data point at pre-counseling and a single data point at post-counseling. Using an SCRD in which a baseline phase and weekly treatment points are collected can help analyze trends over time and identify clinical significance. Lenz (2015) described how practitioners can use SCRDs to make inferences—self as control, flexibility and responsiveness, small sample size, ease of data analysis, and type of data yielded from analyses. In other words, counseling practitioners can analyze data over time with a client and use the data collection and analysis methods in this study to evaluate the impact of their counseling services on client outcomes. Implications and Limitations There are several implications for future research. First, researchers can evaluate the impact of SFBT on other indicators related to subjective well-being and clinical symptoms among culturally diverse populations, including subjective happiness, resilience, grit, meaning in life, anxiety, and depression (Karaman et al., 2019). More research needs to explore how SFBT might enhance indicators of subjective well-being and decrease clinical symptoms as well as the intersection between recovery and psychopathology. Although researchers have explored the impact of SFBT on internalizing symptoms (Schmit et al., 2016), more research needs to examine the impact on subjective well-being, particularly among Latine populations and Latine adolescents at a community counseling clinic.

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