TPC Journal V8, Issue 4- FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 8, Issue 4 305 Frequency and Multivariate Analyses Of the 374 participants who responded to the item regarding whether they had previously attended counseling, 32% ( n = 121) indicated they had. A total of 362 participants specified both their gender and past attendance in counseling. Females’ ( n = 199) rate of attendance in counseling was 35% ( n = 70) and males’ ( n = 163) rate of attendance in counseling was 28% ( n = 45). Eleven percent ( n = 45) of participants were attending counseling at the time of data collection. A factorial 2 (gender) X 2 (attendance in counseling) X 2 (ethnicity) MANOVA was computed to examine demographic differences in participants’ sensitivity to barriers to counseling. All three independent variables had two levels: gender (male or female), attendance in counseling (no previous attendance in counseling or previous attendance in counseling), and ethnicity (White or non-White). Based on the recommendations of Kaneshiro, Geling, Gellert, and Millar (2011), the second level of the ethnicity independent variable, non-White, was aggregated by merging all participants who did not identify as White; this ensured comparable groups for statistical analyses. The dependent variables consisted of respondents’ composite scores on each of the three FSV barriers. Because we were interested in investigating all significant main effects and interaction effects across the univariate and multivariate nature of the data, both MANOVA and follow-up univariate ANOVAs were computed (Field, 2013). Bonferroni corrections were applied to control for the familywise error rate. A significant main effect emerged for gender: F = (7, 354) = 4.73, p = 0.003, Wilks’ Λ = 0.96, η 2 p = 0.04. The univariate ANOVAs (see Table 3) revealed significant main effects for all three FSV barriers: Fit: [ F = (7, 354) = 6.26, p = 0.013, η 2 p = 0.02]; Stigma: [ F = (7, 354) = 13.71, p < 0.001, η 2 p = .04]; and Value: [ F = (7, 354) = 5.52, p = 0.02, η 2 p = .02]. Males ( M = 2.56, M = 2.73, M = 2.60) scored higher than females ( M = 2.25, M = 2.24, M = 2.23) on Fit, Stigma, and Value, respectively. A significant multivariate main effect also emerged for attendance in counseling: F = (7, 354) = 3.80, p = 0.01, Wilks’ Λ = 0.97, η 2 p = 0.031. The univariate ANOVA revealed that participants who had not attended counseling ( M = 2.60) scored higher than participants who had attended counseling ( M = 2.30) on the Value barrier: F = (7, 354) = 4.65, p = 0.03, η 2 p = 0.01. There were no other statistically significant main effects or any interaction effects (see Table 3). That is, there were no other significant group differences in respondents’ sensitivity to the FSV barriers by gender, attendance in counseling, or ethnicity. Discussion The primary aim of the present study was to validate the revised version of the FSV Scale with adults in the United States. Researchers also investigated the percentage of adults that have attended counseling and examined demographic differences in participants’ sensitivity to barriers to counseling. Frequency analyses revealed that 32% of our sample had attended at least one session of personal counseling, and among those who did, females reported a higher rate of attendance (35%) than males (28%). At the time of data collection, 11% of participants were seeing a counselor. Our findings are largely consistent with previous investigations that suggested 15–38% of adults in the United States had sought counseling at some point in their lives (Hann et al., 2014; University of Phoenix, 2013).