TPC Journal V8, Issue 1 - FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 8, Issue 1 65 Students completed the instruments as part of a lecture on career theory and assessment, and in this sense, participation was a part of their course experience. However, all participants had the option of having their assessments removed from data analysis; no participants chose to do so. Participants included 21 Caucasian students, two African American students, and one Hispanic student, with six students identifying as male and 16 students identifying as female. Program tracks included Clinical Mental Health Counseling ( n = 12), School Counseling PK–12 ( n = 11), and Student Affairs in Higher Education ( n = 1). Students in a career counseling course were specifically selected by the researchers in order to support the theory and methodology behind the investigation. Participants were assessed via paper-and-pencil, on a pre- (prior to course participation) and post- (following course participation) timeline. All participants qualifying for the investigation completed pre- and post-assessments, leaving researchers with an overall response rate of 100%. Measures This investigation involved three measures to explore the research questions. The measures used in this study include: (a) the Work Values Inventory (WVI; Super, 1970); (b) the Occupational Engagement Scale (OES-S; Cox et al., 2015); and the (c) Professional Quality of Life Scale (ProQOL; Stamm, 2010). A brief demographics questionnaire was utilized to collect respondent demographics (e.g., age, gender, and ethnicity). The following section describes the measures used in this study. Work Values. The WVI (Super, 1970) is a 45-item measure assessing 15 work values orientations (subscales) on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from (1) unimportant to (5) very important . The subscales are further categorized as extrinsic, intrinsic, and concomitants, and sample items include: “My core values that are important to me in my life are . . . ” and “I value work environments that are . . . ,” followed by qualifiers (e.g., achievement, balance, independence, respect, location, quiet). Cronbach Alphas for the WVI subscales range from .42 to .90 (Wong & Yuen, 2015). Occupational Engagement . The OES-S (Cox et al., 2015) is a 9-item assessment measuring the occupational engagement of college-age students. Items include actions that are regularly available to college students, and participation in those actions increases personal awareness and awareness in their work arena. Sample items include: “I talk about my career choices with family or friends” and “I visit places I’m interested in working so I can learn more about them.” Internal consistency reliability for the OES-S is around .80 (Cox et al., 2015). Professional Quality of Life. The ProQOL (Stamm, 2010) is a 30-item self-report assessment that measures Compassion Satisfaction and Compassion Fatigue. Compassion Fatigue is further divided into two subscales, including Burnout and Secondary Traumatic Stress. Thus, the ProQOL consists of three subscales, including: (a) Burnout (10 items), (b) Compassion Satisfaction (10 items), and (c) Secondary Traumatic Stress (10 items). Participants report the frequency of experiences on a Likert scale ranging from 0 ( never ) to 5 ( very often ). Sample items include: “I am happy” and “I feel trapped by my job as a helper.” Internal consistency coefficients range from .78 (Burnout) to .80 (Compassion Fatigue) to .84 (Compassion Satisfaction; Lawson & Myers, 2011). Data Analysis Data were cleaned and screened for outliers prior to the application of statistical analysis, and it was determined that there were two instances of assessments with missing data in the post-test battery of assessments. Because of the small amount (e.g., four questions missing in total across the entire sample), the researchers decided to average the responses of all participants and fill in the missing data (as per Pallant, 2013). To examine the research questions related to this investigation, assumptions