TPC Journal V8, Issue 2 - FULL ISSUE

186 The Professional Counselor | Volume 8, Issue 2 faculty members. The questionnaire can be administered and scored as a holistic measure (total score), as an overall measure, or as three separate dimensions (subscales) of students and/or faculty members’ perceived competence for promoting mental health on campus. On a practical level, the CMHPCS has utility for college counselors when participating in new student and new faculty orientations due to the brevity (12 items) and versatility (use with faculty and student populations) of the measure. The results might provide college counselors with valuable baseline information on new students and faculty members’ perceived competence toward supporting college student mental health and aid in structuring the content of educational sessions for recognizing and referring students to the counseling center. Brunner et al. (2014) identified supporting referral agents through consultation as another key aspect in the practice of college counseling. The findings presented above demonstrated that higher scores on the engagement scale predicted a greater likelihood in the odds of student referrals to the counseling center among both students and faculty members. This outcome can inform college counselors’ outreach and consultation efforts. Specifically, it is recommended that college counselors focus on increasing university community members’ knowledge and engagement with supporting college student mental health. Advocacy efforts can be directed toward implementing training sessions for faculty members and students for recognizing warning signs of mental health disorders in college students and connecting trainees to resources for mental health disorders. The CMHPCS can be used as a pretest/posttest measure to provide information about the extent to which trainings and mental health support resources are useful for promoting perceived competence for supporting college student mental health. For example, the REDFLAGS Model, an acronym of common warning signs of mental health disorders in college students (Kalkbrenner, 2016), and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline’s wallet cards (National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 2008) are resources for increasing university community members’ awareness of warning signs of mental health disorders in college students. The CMHPCS could be implemented to assess the value of these resources. Limitations and Future Research Although results of the current study were promising, the research caveats should be considered. First, self-report measures can sometimes generate response biases influenced by the respondent’s need for social desirability. Second, the 2-item fear scale is not ideal. Although dimensions composed of few items often generate lower reliability coefficients, there is no absolute threshold for the minimum number of items necessary to comprise a scale (Fowler, 2014). Given the CMHPCS’s stage of development, the researchers chose to retain the dimension. The strong reliability coefficient of the fear subscale (α = .83, student sample and α = .80, faculty sample) exceeded the threshold for acceptable internal consistency reliability. The overall scale is also stronger with the fear scale items included. Finally, it should be noted that other validated instruments in social sciences research have scales comprised of two items (Luecht, Madsen, Taugher, & Petterson, 1990), suggesting that the fear scale may be useful. The demographic profile of faculty in our sample was consistent with the ethnic identities of the larger university and with a national sample of faculty members (Myers, 2016). However, the homogeneity of ethnicity among faculty participants still might have affected the generalizability of our findings. Most faculty participants (81%, n = 162) identified as Caucasian or White. It is recommended that future researchers confirm the factor structure of the CMHPCS with an ethnically diverse sample of faculty members. Subsequent investigation should examine the goodness-of-fit of the CMHPCS with different populations of college students and faculty members. Specifically, the following sub-groups of college students appear to be especially susceptible to mental health disorders: first-generation college students,