TPC Journal V8, Issue 1 - FULL ISSUE

38 The Professional Counselor | Volume 8, Issue 1 counselor, and (c) five Likert scale questions about the participants’ views on counselor professional identity standards for clinical mental health counseling students. The demographic variables included: gender identity, age, all licenses held by a state licensure board, year of graduation from their master’s counseling program, current employment setting, and race. We calculated Cronbach’s alpha for the 5-item scale using the following interpretation: > .9 defined as Excellent, > .8 defined as Good, and > .7 defined as Acceptable (George & Mallery, 2003). Cronbach’s alpha was excellent at .9 for the 5-item scale. We retained all five items in the scale because each item in the scale contributed to increasing Cronbach’s alpha for the scale and the items correlated well. We calculated a principal component factor analysis using all participants for the 5-item scale. We used three criteria to determine the number of factors in the scale: the a priori hypothesis that the measure was unidimensional, the scree test, and the factor solution. The scree plot confirmed the initial hypothesis that there was one factor in the 5-item scale. Based on the plot, we rotated one factor using the Varimax rotation procedure, and this factor accounted for 67.5% of the variance. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy for the survey was 0.8 (Great) based on the responses given by participants. Values between 0.8 and 0.9 classify as Great, and values above 0.9 classify as Superb (Hutcheson & Sofroniou, 1999). Data Analysis Procedures We ran five data analyses for the study. Cronbach’s alpha calculations calculated the internal consistency among survey items. Principal components factor analysis determined the number of factors in the scale. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy explained the degree of common variance among the variables. To answer the first research question, we used descriptive statistics from a mail survey designed to explore survey responses from independently licensed counselors (Fink & Kosecoff, 1998). To answer the second research question, we used Kendall’s tau-b correlation coefficient to determine the relationship between independently licensed counselors clearly identifying as a counselor to others and their views on the 5-item scale measuring counselor professional identity standards for clinical mental health students. To answer the third research question, we used Kendall’s tau-b correlation coefficients as a post hoc analysis to determine the relationship between independently licensed counselors clearly identifying as a counselor to others and their views on each of the five counselor professional identity standards separately. Results We used descriptive statistics to quantify independently licensed counselors’ responses to the six Likert scale items measured in the study. First, for the question asking about the importance of clearly identifying as a counselor to others, participants’ scores fell at 3.39 between Sometimes Clear and Often Clear (see Table 1). When asked about being supervised in graduate school and post- graduation by a licensed counselor, counselor educators being licensed and trained as counselors, the unique philosophy of the profession of counseling being taught to graduate students, and the importance of CACREP accreditation for clinical mental health programs, participants’ scores ranged from 3.62 to 3.75, which fell between Slightly Important and Moderately Important (Table 1). Second, we examined the relationship between independently licensed counselors’ clarity in identifying as a counselor to others and their scores on the combined scale of professional identity standards. We found significance at a moderate effect size with a positive association between consistently identifying as a counselor to others and finding counselor professional identity standards important when training clinical mental health counselors, τb = .32, p < .01. Consistently identifying