TPC Journal V8, Issue 4- FULL ISSUE

344 The Professional Counselor | Volume 8, Issue 4 counseling practicum experience under live supervision in a university-based clinical counseling and research center. In their study, the researchers did not actively engage in empathy training. Rather, they measured counseling students’ pre- and post-scores on an empathy measure as a result of students’ engagement in supervised counseling work to foster general counseling skills. Implications of these findings mirror those described by Teding van Berkhout and Malouff (2016), namely that it is difficult to identify specific empathy-promoting mechanisms. In other words, it appears that empathy training, when employed, produces successful outcomes in CITs. However, counseling students’ empathy also increases in the absence of specific empathy-promoting programs. This begs the question: Are counseling programs successfully training their counselors to be empathic, and is there a difference between CITs’ empathy or sympathy levels compared to students in other academic majors? Thus, the purpose of the present study was to (a) examine differences in empathy (i.e., affective empathy and cognitive empathy) and sympathy levels among emerging adult college students, and (b) determine whether CITs had different levels of empathy and sympathy when compared to their academic peers. Methods Participants We identified master’s-level CITs as the population of interest in this investigation. We intended to compare CITs to other graduate and undergraduate college student populations. Thus, we utilized a convenience sample from a larger data set that included emerging adult college students between the ages of 18 and 29 who were enrolled in at least one undergraduate- or graduate-level course at nine colleges and universities throughout the United States. Participants were included regardless of demographic variables (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity). Participants were recruited from three sources: online survey distribution ( n = 448; 51.6%), face- to-face data collection ( n = 361; 41.6%), and email solicitation ( n = 34; 3.9%). In total, 10,157 potential participants had access to participate in the investigation by online survey distribution through the psychology department at a large Southeastern university; however, the automated system limited responses to 999 participants. We and our contacts (i.e., faculty at other institutions) distributed an additional 800 physical data collection packets to potential participants, and 105 additional potential participants were solicited by email. Overall, 1,713 data packets were completed, resulting in a sample of 1,598 participants after data cleaning. However, in order to conduct the analyses for this study, it was necessary to limit our sample to groups of approximately equal sizes (Hair, Black, Babin, & Anderson, 2010). Therefore, we were limited to the use of a subsample of 868 participants. Our sample appeared similar to other samples included in investigations exploring empathy with emerging adult college students (e.g., White, heterosexual, female; Konrath et al., 2011). The participants included in this investigation were enrolled in one of six majors and programs of study, including Athletic Training/Health Sciences ( n = 115; 13.2%); Biology/Biomedical Sciences/ Preclinical Health Sciences ( n = 167; 19.2%); Communication ( n = 163; 18.8%); Counseling ( n = 153; 17.6%); Nursing ( n = 128; 14.7%); and Psychology ( n = 142; 16.4%). It is necessary to note that students self-identified their major rather than selecting it from a preexisting prompt. Therefore, the researchers examined responses and categorized similar responses to one uniform title. For example, responses of psych were included with psychology . Further, in order to attain homogeneity among group sizes, we included multiple tracks within one program. For example, counseling included participants enrolled in either clinical mental health counseling ( n = 115), marriage and family counseling ( n = 24), or school counseling ( n = 14) tracks. Table 1 presents additional demographic information (e.g., age, race, ethnicity, graduate-level status). It is necessary to note that, because of the constraints of the dataset,