The Professional Counselor | Volume 14, Issue 3 292 Procedures and Data Collection After we obtained university Institutional Review Board approval, participants were invited to participate through convenience sampling from agencies, private practices, and university counseling centers in the northeast region of the United States. We also searched online counselor directories for counselors who fit the criteria of our study. Upon completing interviews, we also recruited participants via snowball sampling by asking initial participants for recommendations for new potential participants to interview who also met our inclusion criteria. Given that many college counselors’ clients are almost all within the emerging adult age range, they served as valuable participants in our data collection. However, these counselors only see clients in the college context and do not see non-college emerging adult clients, an important and often forgotten population of emerging adults (Nice & Joseph, 2023). To assure the study focused on professional counselors, we limited our participants who worked in college counseling centers to account for less than half of our total participants (n = 5). Interview questions were developed by the research team by first examining the extant counseling and young and emerging adulthood literature. Nice developed questions grounded by the literature and sent the questions to the research team for their suggestions, additions, and edits. The interview questions approved by the research team were sent to Sickels, who provided feedback for creating the final interview protocol. Prior to interviews, participants signed a consent form and completed a demographics questionnaire. Participants were also provided with a document outlining the five features of emerging adulthood (Arnett, 2004, 2015) that they were asked to review prior to the interview in order to better understand and answer the interview questions pertaining to these features. We conducted semi-structured interviews lasting approximately 60 minutes via Zoom over an 8-month span. Participants were offered a $20 electronic gift card as an incentive for participation. At the start of each interview, participants were reminded that questions pertaining to their clients only pertained to their emerging adult–aged clients, within the years of 18 to 29, and not any clients outside of that age range. Each interview consisted of eight open-ended questions (see Table 2). Participants were also asked follow-up questions for clarification. These questions were guided by Arnett’s (2000) theory of emerging adulthood, a well-studied and accepted understanding of the developmental markers and features that individuals experience during young adult development. To understand participants’ experiences of counseling young adults during this developmental phase, we asked several questions pertaining to their experience of their clients’ developmental features of emerging adulthood (i.e., identity exploration, sense of possibilities, self-focus, instability, and feeling in-between) in counseling sessions. For consistency across participants, we asked each interview question in the same order during each interview (Creswell & Creswell, 2017). The pace of each interview was determined by the participant to allow for the development of richer data (Hays & Singh, 2023), with impromptu questions asked between established questions when elaboration was needed.
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