TPC Journal-Vol 9- Issue 4-FULL ISSUE

288 The Professional Counselor | Volume 9, Issue 4 Student Network [COUNSGRADS]). Because of the impossibility of knowing how many individuals received the email invitation, we were unable to calculate and determine a response rate. Accordingly, a total of 114 CITs initially agreed to participate in this study. Before data analysis, we inspected the data set for possible entry errors and missing data. After the inspection, we excluded 28 participants from all subsequent data analyses resulting in the reduced sample of 86 CITs used to address our research questions. Overall, the sample consisted of 78 female (90.7%) and eight male (9.3%) participants, and the mean age of the participants was 32.89 years ( SD = 9.72) with participants’ ages ranging between 21 and 62 years. Participants were from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds, with the sample consisting of White ( n = 48, 55.8%), Hispanic/Latino ( n = 18, 20.9%), Black/African American ( n = 12, 14.0%), and Asian ( n = 5, 5.8%) CITs. Three participants (3.5%) listed their ethnicities as “other” when providing demographic information. Participants reported their program enrollment as follows: clinical mental health counseling program ( n = 47, 54.7%); school counseling program ( n = 23, 26.7%); marriage, couple, and family counseling program ( n = 4, 4.7%); college counseling and student affairs program ( n = 3, 3.5%); addiction counseling program ( n = 2, 2.3%); and other programs ( n = 7, 8.1%). Additionally, most of the participants ( n = 73, 84.9%) reported enrollment in a CACREP-accredited program with the remaining participants ( n = 13, 15.1%) enrolled in a non–CACREP-accredited program. Procedure Upon receiving institutional review board approval, we recruited participants from different institutions with the primary researcher contacting professional colleagues at various departments to disseminate the online survey link to potential participants during the 2017 summer and fall semesters. We also recruited participants through professional listservs (e.g., CESNET-L, TACESNET-L, COUNSGRAD), with listserv participants being provided the same informed consent and survey link through a secure website. The survey completion process took approximately 15–20 minutes. Measures We used the following self-administered survey questionnaires and a separate demographic data sheet in our data collection. Professional Quality of Life Scale (ProQOL). This scale is designed to measure the mental and emotional consequences of working with individuals who experienced trauma or painful events (Stamm, 2010). The ProQOL includes two main traits, Compassion Satisfaction (positive) and Compassion Fatigue (negative). Compassion Satisfaction is related to the joy individuals develop when they do their work well (Stamm, 2010). Compassion Fatigue consists of two subscales: Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS) and Burnout. Scholars have defined STS as an emotional state that occurs when an individual becomes upset or traumatized as a result of their exposure to victim experiences (Figley, 2002). The second part of Compassion Fatigue is Burnout, which is a multidimensional syndrome related to the social work environment. Burnout could be related to work overload, lack of control, insufficient rewards, unfairness, and value conflict at a workplace (Skovholt & Trotter-Mathison, 2016). The ProQOL is a 30-item Likert-type self-report assessment with responses of never, rarely, sometimes, often, and very often for each item . A sample item is “I feel depressed because of the traumatic experiences of the people I [help].” This assessment has 10 questions per each of three main scales measuring separate constructs. However, the Compassion Fatigue scale includes two of these constructs, which are the Burnout and the STS scales. According to Stamm (2010), the ProQOL has good construct validity, as researchers have noted its efficacy in over 200 published articles. Finally, alpha coefficient values for the Burnout and STS scales were .75 and .81, respectively (Stamm, 2010), and are similar (.72 and .79) to the Cronbach’s alpha values from the current study presented in Table 1.