TPC Journal-Vol 10- Issue 2-FULL ISSUE

208 The Professional Counselor | Volume 10, Issue 2 participants were disseminated, with each request coming 2 weeks apart. Participants who completed the survey in full had the option of submitting their email in a separate survey to be included in a drawing for two signed copies of neuroscience in counseling texts. Role of the Researchers To limit unconscious bias in the research process, we engaged in discussions throughout survey development, data collection, and data analysis. Such conversations detailed our respective passions, assumptions, histories, and visions of the profession. Several prior assumptions emerged in this recursive process. These ethical concerns largely mirrored the issues raised in existing literature and described in the introduction section of this article. The primary assumption included the belief that incorporating neuroscience into counseling is a largely positive endeavor but that counselors should follow ethical guidelines outlined by professional counseling organizations to avoid ethical concerns related to integration. One author explicitly assumed that participants would generally default to the ACA Code of Ethics in their response, such that responses might begin with, “According to the ACA Code of Ethics regarding new specialty areas of practice. . . .” One author assumed that most participants would preface their response with “It depends on what you mean by ‘integration’” because integration was intentionally undefined in the survey. We continually challenged and actively reflected on these assumptions in order to understand the impact on the authors’ relationship with the data and subsequent themes (Hays et al., 2016; Hunt, 2011). We also engaged in reflective writing, particularly through writing memos (Hunt, 2011), in order to maintain awareness of worldviews and potential for bias in coding. Commonly referred to as reflexivity, this process aided in being transparent about assumptions rather than trying to behave as if any researcher would be able to be free from biases in approaching a set of data (Hays et al., 2016). Additionally, we established an electronic audit trail that enabled returning to the data, tracking the process, and checking that the coding remained close to the words of the participants. Lastly, two of the authors served as auditors for the results, having familiarized themselves with the data, but refraining from engagement in analysis and theme development. Data Analysis We selected thematic analysis, grounded in a pragmatist framework (Duffy & Chenail, 2008), to guide the inquiry into perceptions regarding the ethics of integrating neuroscience and counseling. Clarke and Braun (2017) defined thematic analysis as “a method for identifying, analyzing, and interpreting patterns of meaning (‘themes’) within qualitative data” (p. 297). We reviewed literature related to content analysis and thematic analysis and found that there was significant overlap (and sometimes merging) of the two approaches in published literature. Our best understanding of the two related approaches is that they exist on a continuum, with content analysis stopping at the manifest level of analysis and thematic analysis continuing to identify broader meanings. Although we stayed very close to the participants’ responses in coding, we did move beyond content analysis “categories” to extract some inductive-level themes across cases. We followed Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six-phase framework, utilizing an inductive and semantic approach to thematic analysis. Braun and Clarke described these connected approaches to analysis as “a process of coding the data without trying to fit it into a preexisting coding frame, or the researcher’s analytic preconceptions . . . themes are identified within the explicit or surface meanings of the data” (pp. 83–84). Given that the data were obtained through an open-ended survey question versus an in- depth interview protocol that could capture greater context and meaning, we aimed to stay close to participants’ exact words. In this way we resisted the urge to include guesses at participants’ motivations or assumptions as part of themes. The emergent codes and themes reflect an inductive, descriptive account of participants’ perceptions. We followed the subsequent steps in analyzing the data.