TPC Journal V8, Issue 4- FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 8, Issue 4 307 Similar to previous literature on attendance in counseling and congruent with gender theory (Levant, Wimer, & Williams, 2011; Seidler et al., 2017; Vogel, Heimerdinger-Edwards, Hammer, & Hubbard, 2011), we found that males were less likely to seek counseling and were particularly susceptible to the Stigma, Fit, and Value barriers when compared to females. Susceptibility to the Stigma barrier suggests that men might be less likely to attend counseling because of feelings of shame or embarrassment (Cheng, Kwan, & Sevig, 2013; Cheng, Wang, McDermott, Kridel, & Rislin, 2018; J. E. Kim, Saw, & Zane, 2015). Males also reported a higher sensitivity to the Fit and Value barriers as compared to women, suggesting they might place less worth on the anticipated benefits of counseling, and if they were to enter counseling, they may be particularly concerned about finding a counselor with whom they are compatible. It is possible that men’s sensitivity to all FSV barriers may simply be related to their underutilization of counseling services when compared to women, although other explanations also might be plausible. Consistent with Kalkbrenner et al. (in press), we found that independent of gender, participants who had not attended at least one session of personal counseling placed less value on its potential benefits as compared to those who had attended counseling. This finding suggests that to some extent, attendance in personal counseling might moderate the aforementioned gender differences in participants’ sensitivity to the Value barrier. It is possible that attendance in counseling accounts for a more meaningful amount of the variance in sensitivity to the Value barrier to counseling than gender. Also, consistent with the findings of Kalkbrenner et al. (in press) and Kalkbrenner and Neukrug (2018), we found psychometric support for the factorial validity of the revised version of the FSV scale. Similar to these previous investigations (Kalkbrenner & Neukrug, 2018; Kalkbrenner et al., in press), tests of internal consistency revealed strong reliability coefficients for all three FSV scales. The findings of the present investigators add to the growing body of literature on Fit, Stigma, and Value as three primary barriers to seeking counseling among a variety of populations, including human services professionals (Neukrug et al., 2017), professional counselors (Kalkbrenner et al., in press), counselor trainees (Kalkbrenner & Neukrug, 2018), and now with members of the general U.S. population. An investigation of the path model coefficients (see Figure 1) revealed moderate to strong associations between the FSV barriers, higher compared to past investigations (Kalkbrenner & Neukrug, 2018; Kalkbrenner et al., in press). A follow-up CFA was computed to test if a single-factor model (aggregated FSV barriers into a single scale) was a better factor solution for the data. However, the follow-up CFA revealed poor model fit for the single factor solution, suggesting that Fit, Stigma, and Value comprise three separate dimensions of a related construct. The differences in the strength of association between the FSV scales in the present study and in the studies by Kalkbrenner et al. (in press) and Kalkbrenner and Neukrug (2018) might be explained by differences between the samples. These investigators validated the FSV barriers with populations of professional counselors and counseling students. It is possible that professional counselors and counseling students were better able to discriminate between different types of barriers to counseling compared to members of the general U.S. population because of the clinical nature of their training. In addition, minor discrepancies are expected in any psychometric study in which authors are attempting to confirm the dimensionality of an attitudinal measure with a new sample (Hendrick, Fischer, Tobi, & Frewer, 2013). To summarize, the results of internal consistency reliability and CFA indicated that the Revised FSV Scale and its dimensions were estimated adequately with a stratified random sample of adults in the United States. We found close to one-third of our sample had attended counseling, 11% were in counseling at the time of data collection, and there were demographic differences in participants’ sensitivity to barriers to counseling by gender and past attendance in counseling. A number of implications for enhancing counseling practice have emerged from these findings.