TPC Journal V8, Issue 2 - FULL ISSUE

162 The Professional Counselor | Volume 8, Issue 2 female with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in school counseling. She was a licensed professional counselor, a National Certified Counselor, and a recipient of a National Board for Certified Counselors minority fellowship. Her professional experience has included college access interventions, outpatient therapy employment, student services in higher education, and transitional living intervention programming. She previously served children and adolescents from underserved backgrounds, a significant number of whom were in foster care. She has had previous research experience; however, the present study was her first SCRD experience. Instrumentation Career and college readiness self-efficacy. The Career and College Readiness Self-Efficacy Inventory (CCRSI; Baker & Parikh Foxx, 2012) was completed by participants across all three phases of the study. The CCRSI readiness construct is based on Savickas’ (2011) career constructivist theory, and the self-efficacy concept was derived from Bandura’s (1997) social cognitive theory. Item content represents broad contextual goals (e.g., “I have confidence in being able to achieve a good life 10 years from now”) and specific content (e.g., “I know about various ways to pay for post-high school education”). Responses to each item range from strongly agree (5 points) to strongly disagree (1 point). There are 14 items in the total scale with scores ranging from 14 to 70. Higher scores indicate higher levels of self-efficacy. In the present study, the customized interventions were based on the four CCRSI factors, and the factor scores were used in the data analyses. The CCRSI factors are: (a) college knowledge (5 items; scores ranging from 5 to 25); (b) positive personal characteristics (4 items; scores ranging from 4 to 20); (c) academic competence (3 items; scores ranging from 3 to 15); and (d) potential to set and achieve future goals (2 items; scores ranging from 2 to 10). An exploratory factor analysis of the CCRSI identified the four factors as accounting for 51% of the variance (Baker et al., 2017), and a confirmatory factor analysis supported the four-factor model (Martinez, Baker, & Young, 2017). Alpha reliability estimates for the total scale from two previous studies were .86 and .87. For the factor scales, they were: (a) college knowledge (.76 and .80), (b) positive personal characteristics (.69 and .70), (c) academic competence (.75 and .75), and (d) potential to set and achieve future goals (.46 and .51; Baker et al., 2017). Social validity measure. Social validity refers to the social significance of the intervention (Wolf, 1978). According to Hott, Limberg, Ohrt, and Schmit (2015), evidence of social validity serves as a quality indicator in SCRDs and should be presented clearly in the results sections of said studies. Client satisfaction is one of the indicators of social validity recommended by Hott et al. (2015). An extant self-report measure designed to assess participants’ attitudes about research interventions upon their completion was used in the present study. The Attitude Toward Treatment (ATT; Baker, 1983) scale was used to assess satisfaction with the intervention in the present study. The ATT was used previously as a post-treatment measure of satisfaction with psychoeducational group intervention. Content validity for using the ATT to assess client attitudes toward the interventions they received in clinical settings, as was the case in the present research, had been established in previous studies. The ATT consists of 14 seven-point Likert items with the wording presented in the past tense (e.g., How beneficial do you think this program was for you?). Scores range from a low of 14 to a high of 98. Assessing unforeseen participant and setting changes. To control for threats to internal validity caused by unforeseen changes in the participants, the counselor-investigator kept field notes for each participant throughout the study (Hott et al., 2015).