TPC Journal-Vol 9 Issue 3-FULL

234 The Professional Counselor | Volume 9, Issue 3 Consultation and Supervision as Related and Distinct Areas of Practice In addition to validation of the CSS-S, our findings also point out other significant information. The domains of consultation and supervision have long been conceptually linked in the literature, primarily in terms of both serving as modalities for senior clinicians to provide support and mentorship to their colleagues (Truneckova, Viney, Maitland, & Seaborn, 2010). The consultation paradigm of consultee- based mental health consultation (Newman & Ingraham, 2017) shares similarities to clinical supervision in terms of a shared focus on promoting skill development in consultees or supervisees to work with an identified client population or presenting problem. In the Discrimination Model, consultation is presented as one of the roles of clinical supervisors while training professional counselors (Bernard & Goodyear, 2018). According to the Discrimination Model, supervisors’ engagement in a consultative, collaborative relationship is seen as a hallmark of supervisee development, in which the supervisee is invited to contribute as a peer and fellow professional expert (Bernard & Goodyear, 2018). From their phenomenological study of the supervisory relationship between female supervisors and supervisees, Mangione, Mears, Vincent, and Hawes (2011) also reported that consultation emerged as an important theme when participants reflected on how to create a collaborative environment during the supervision process. Adopting the role of consultant may enhance the supervision process for counselors-in-training (Sangganjanavanich & Lenz, 2012). For example, Granello, Kindsvatter, Granello, Underfer-Babalis, and Moorhead (2008) identified peer consultation as an intervention for promoting perspective taking and overall cognitive development in supervisees. The relationships between the counselors’ perceptions of their consultation skills and supervisory working alliance in the current study were indications of the complementary relationship between counseling professionals’ consultation and supervision roles. Our findings appear to promote the understanding that although consultation skills and different dimensions of supervisory work are intertwined, they are also distinct concepts, and expertise in one modality does not necessarily ensure expertise in the other. Limitations The current study involved limitations that need to be reported. First, we specifically targeted counseling professionals in this study and did not include participants from other fields. Another group of counselors or participants from other fields (e.g., social work, nursing) may have yielded different results than the ones we obtained in this study. Second, we did not examine some of the specific demographic variables (e.g., specialty areas, position) within our data set. Those variables may have influenced the results of the current study. Lastly, despite being part of a master list of licensed counselors, self-selection of our participants in this study could indicate participants’ interest in consultation as an area of practice. The authors may not have reached out to enough participants who lacked knowledge and experience of consultation, or had sufficient participants with experience as a supervisor to effectively complete the SWAI-S. Implications for Future Research and Practice Our results supporting the psychometric qualities of the CSS-S have both research and practical implications, many of which are connected to one another. The lack of a psychometrically sound measure of counselors’ consultation skills has limited research on consultation efficacy in the counseling literature and the research base of other helping fields (Dougherty, 2013). Assessing counselors’ perceptions of their consultation skills with the CSS-S can help to clarify and contribute to consultation efficacy research in counseling and counselor education. The small number of items on the CSS-S also offers researchers the convenience of a brief measure for participants to self-assess their consultation skills and can help clarify how this construct influences other areas of counseling practice. For example, the CSS-S may be used with participants from different specialty areas of counseling (e.g., school counseling, mental health counseling) and different professional development levels (e.g., counseling