438 The Professional Counselor | Volume 10, Issue 4 Purpose of the Study The purpose of this study was to begin to address the gap in what is known regarding the extent of regional differences for the number of CACREP-accredited doctoral programs in CES. To date, regional differences in the number of CACREP-accredited doctoral programs have not been studied. The researchers believed that gaining information about regional differences in the number of doctoral programs would be helpful in understanding the nature and extent of the pipeline problem in CES. Methodology The guiding research question was as follows: To what extent do regional differences exist in the number of CACREP-accredited doctoral programs in CES? The researchers identified two hypotheses: 1) There are differences in the number of doctoral programs by region even when controlling for population size, and 2) The number of CACREP-accredited master’s programs is a strong predictor of doctoral CACREP-accredited programs by state. Because counselor education programs must already have achieved master’s CACREP accreditation for a full 8 years in order to apply for doctoral CACREP accreditation (CACREP, 2019a), the researchers hypothesized that the number of doctoral programs by region would be directly related to the number of CACREPaccredited master’s programs in the region. For the purposes of this study, the word program refers to a counseling academic unit housed within an academic institution offering one or more CACREP-accredited master’s counseling specialties that include addiction counseling; career counseling; clinical mental health counseling; clinical rehabilitation counseling; college counseling and student affairs; marriage, couple, and family counseling; rehabilitation counseling; or school counseling. These programs also may offer a doctorate in CES. In this study, master’s programs were tallied by program unit rather than specialization tracks within programs to avoid counting multiples for the same master’s program. The researchers selected an ex post facto quantitative design to compare doctoral programs by region and state. Data were gathered through four sources: (a) CACREP-accredited master’s and doctoral counselor education programs on the CACREP (n.d.) website; (b) listing of population demographics and population density on the U.S. Census Bureau (2020) website; (c) listing of public and private colleges by state from the National Center for Education Statistics (n.d.) website; and (d) listing of counseling psychology doctoral programs accredited by the American Psychological Association (APA; 2019). Data for variables (b) through (d) were collected to ascertain whether the prediction of the number of CACREP-accredited master’s programs within states was complicated by extraneous variables such as state population size, state population density, number of colleges and universities in the state, and number of APA-accredited counseling psychology programs within states. Counseling psychology doctoral programs were identified as a potential predictor variable because doctoral programs in counseling psychology and CES are often considered competitor programs for resources such as faculty lines, as core faculty cannot be shared between APA- and CACREP-accredited programs (CACREP, 2015). Thus, a preponderance of counseling psychology doctoral programs within a state could potentially limit the number of CES doctoral programs within the same state. The researchers limited the search to CACREP-accredited programs only because of the 2013 requirement for CACREP-accredited programs to specifically hire doctoral CES graduates. Programs that are not accredited by CACREP may subvert a regional pipeline problem by hiring faculty from related disciplines, such as psychology. For this reason, non–CACREP-accredited programs were
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDU5MTM1