The Professional Counselor | Volume 10, Issue 4 441 Results Table 1 and the Appendix display the number of CACREP-accredited doctoral and master’s programs by both region and state. The researchers used these data to test the hypotheses using inferential statistics. Differences in CACREP-Accredited Doctoral Programs by Region The researchers tested the hypothesis that significant differences existed for the number of CACREPaccredited doctoral programs among the five regions, even when the confounding variable of population size was controlled. The sample size of 51 exceeded the requirement for 80% power at the .05 alpha level (i.e., n = 42). Levene’s test for equality of error variances was not significant, indicating that parametric statistics could be performed without adjustments (A. Field, 2013). A one-way independent-samples ANCOVA for differences in number of programs by region was significant—F(4, 45) = 4.64, p < .05, η2 = .38—and represented a large effect size (Cohen, 1988). The Southern region had the largest number of CACREP-accredited doctoral programs (n = 45). This was nearly twice the number of CACREP-accredited doctoral programs of the second-ranked region (North Central, n = 23), and more CACREP-accredited doctoral programs than the other four regions combined (n = 41). Compared to the Southern and North Central regions, the other three regions— namely the North Atlantic, Rocky Mountain, and Western regions—had substantially fewer CACREPaccredited doctoral programs. The North Atlantic and Rocky Mountain regions had eight CACREPaccredited doctoral programs each, and the Western region had two. The Southern region had the highest percentage of states with CACREP-accredited doctoral programs at 93% (14 of 15 states). The number of CACREP-accredited doctoral programs per state was not equally distributed by region. Figure 1 and the Appendix show that in the Southern region, 14 of 15 states had CACREPaccredited doctoral programs, with two states having an especially high number of doctoral programs (i.e., Virginia = 9, Texas = 8). Other Southern region states (i.e., Maryland and South Carolina) only had a single doctoral program. In the North Atlantic region, counselor education programs were concentrated within specific geographic locations. The eight doctoral programs in the region were located within three states (i.e., New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania) and the District of Columbia. The remaining seven states, including the entirety of New England (i.e., Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont) have zero CACREP-accredited doctoral programs. To better understand the relationship between doctoral programs and population size, ratios were computed comparing the population to doctoral and master’s programs by region. Table 1 depicts the ratio for population to doctoral programs by region. Upon further inspection of the data, it appears that population size could explain the number of doctoral programs in a region. For example, the Southern region had by far the greatest number of CACREP-accredited doctoral programs at 45, yet the proportion of programs was roughly equivalent for four of the five regions when considering the population size of those regions. As seen in Table 1, the population of the Southern region was 119 million people, which was 1.65 times the size of the next largest region, the North Central region (72 million). Accordingly, the number of doctoral programs in the Southern region was nearly double the number of programs in the North Central region (45 vs. 23). When examining the ratio of population to CACREP-accredited doctoral programs, the Southern region appears to have a roughly equivalent representation (2.6 million per doctoral program) to two other regions, the Rocky Mountain (1.8 million) and North Central (3.1 million) regions.
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