TPC Journal-Vol 9 Issue 3-FULL

The Professional Counselor | Volume 9, Issue 3 235 interns, counselors working toward licensure, licensed counselors) to understand the participants’ consultation skills perceptions and their potential needs. Researchers also could utilize the CSS-S to address the need for examinations of consultants’ relative competence to practice consultation from a theory-based foundation. The CSS-S could address the gap between consultation training, practice, and research. Particularly, as counselors and counselor educators prepare to operate in a modern clinical environment, where behavioral and physical health care professionals are encouraged and expected to collaborate effectively, assessing counselors’ consultation abilities could help support development of the skills necessary to operate within the integrated care paradigm. Similarly, because of the generic language of the instrument, researchers could establish the validity and reliability properties of the CSS-S with samples from other fields (e.g., social work, nursing). In these efforts, researchers also could compare professionals from different fields (e.g., counseling vs. nursing) to examine similarities and differences among the participants’ consultation skills perceptions as well as other variables (e.g., consultation training and practice experiences), and explore the discipline-specific factors that may influence how consultation is practiced and when it is considered to be an effective intervention. Researchers have identified the process nature of consultation as an impediment to establishing the efficacy of consultation (Erchul & Sheridan, 2014). Consultants’ ability to practice consultation as a distinct helping intervention is both a process and outcome variable, and a valid measure of this construct can help to establish baseline levels of consultant ability or serve to identify when during the consultation relationship a consultant feels most capable. In tandem, counselor education programs could use the CSS-S as a baseline instrument to identify relative levels of familiarity with the consultation paradigm and tailor their consultation-related pedagogy to the needs and expectations of counselor trainees with different levels of consultation proficiency. Being able to assess consultation proficiency also can help to clarify when and what types of training are most effective. Questions related to where in the curriculum this domain should be introduced, what methods are optimal for ensuring retention and mastery, and what benchmarks exist for the development of consultation skills can be explored empirically with the measure presented in this study. Conclusion We presented the results of a psychometric investigation of the CSS-S, a derived measure assessing participants’ perceptions of their skills to practice consultation as a distinct modality based on specific knowledge and skills. The preliminary findings demonstrate support for continued use of the CSS-S in research on consultation and support previous conceptual scholarship identifying consultation as complementary to but also distinct from clinical supervision and interprofessional collaboration. Training in consultation (i.e., coursework, supervised experience, postgraduate workshop attendance) appeared to increase participants’ perceptions of consultation skills as measured with the CSS-S. Consultation is a distinct mode of counseling and behavioral health practice, and being able to assess consultants’ perceptions of their own abilities is an important step in advancing the research base on consultation theory and how this domain can be employed to promote better outcomes for clients, students, and communities, not only in educational and clinical settings, but also in integrated health care settings. Conflict of Interest and Funding Disclosure The authors reported no conflict of interest or funding contributions for the development of this manuscript.