TPC Journal V8, Issue 4- FULL ISSUE

302 The Professional Counselor | Volume 8, Issue 4 Instrumentation Using the Qualtrics e-survey platform (Qualtrics, 2018), participants were asked to respond to a series of demographic questions as well as the Revised FSV Scale. Demographic questionnaire. Participants responded to a series of demographic items about their age, ethnicity, gender, highest level of education completed, and if they had health insurance. They also were asked to indicate if they had ever recommended counseling to another person and if they had ever participated in at least one session of counseling as defined by the American Counseling Association (ACA) in the 20/20: Consensus Definition of Counseling : “counseling is a professional relationship that empowers diverse individuals, families, and groups to accomplish mental health, wellness, education, and career goals” (2010, para. 2). The FSV Scale. The original version of the FSV Scale contained 32 items that comprise three subscales (Fit, Stigma, and Value) for appraising barriers to counselor seeking behavior (Neukrug et al., 2017). Kalkbrenner et al. (in press) developed and validated the Revised FSV Scale by reducing the number of items to 14 (of the original 32) and confirmed the same 3-factor structure of the scale. The Revised FSV Scale (see Table 1) was used in the present study for temporal validity, as it is more current and because it is likely to reduce respondent fatigue, because it is shorter than the original. The Fit subscale appraises the degree to which one trusts the process of counseling (e.g., item 11: “I couldn’t find a counselor who would understand me.”). The Stigma subscale measures respondents’ hesitation to seek counseling because of feelings of embarrassment (e.g., item 1: “My friends would think negatively of me.”). The Value scale reflects the extent to which a respondent thinks that attending personal counseling will be beneficial (e.g., item 8: “It is not an effective use of my time.”). For each item, respondents were prompted with the stem, “I am less likely to attend counseling because . . . ” and asked to rate each item on a Likert-type scale: 1 ( strongly disagree ), 2 ( disagree ), 3 ( neither agree or disagree ), 4 ( agree ), or 5 ( strongly agree ). Higher scores designate a greater sensitivity to each barrier. Previous investigators demonstrated adequate to strong internal consistency reliability coefficients for the Revised FSV Scale: α = .82, α = .91, and α = .78, respectively ( Kalkbrenner et al., in press) and α = .81, α = .87, and α = .77 (Kalkbrenner & Neukrug, 2018). Past investigators found validity evidence for the 3-dimensional factor structure of the original and revised versions of the FSV Scale through rigorous psychometric testing (factor analysis) with populations of human services professionals (Neukrug et al., 2017), professional counselors (Kalkbrenner et al., in press), and counseling students (Kalkbrenner & Neukrug, 2018). Results CFA A review of skewness and kurtosis values (see Table 1) indicated that the 14 items on the revised FSV scale were largely within the acceptable range of a normal distribution (absolute value < 1; Field, 2013). Mahalanobis d 2 indices showed no extreme multivariate outliers. An inter-item correlation matrix (see Table 2) was computed to investigate the suitability of the data for factor analysis. Inter- item correlations were favorable and ranged from r = 0.42 to r = 0.82 (see Table 2).