Dec 22, 2025 | Volume 15 - Issue 4
Shadin Atiyeh
This study explored the challenges and strategies employed by counselor educators in training students to work effectively with refugee populations. Utilizing a qualitative descriptive analysis, a qualitative open-ended survey was conducted with 11 counselor educators and a focus group meeting with four counselor educators from various CACREP-accredited master’s programs across the United States. The analysis revealed several barriers to effective training, including the perceived limited relevance of the topic, time constraints within courses, and the complexity of addressing refugee issues. Participants emphasized the pressing need for comprehensive curricula that integrate refugee concerns and enhance multicultural competence. Findings suggest that diverse teaching strategies, such as case studies and experiential learning, are essential for preparing students to meet the unique mental health needs of refugees. This study underscores the importance of equipping future counselors with the skills and knowledge required to support this underserved population effectively and to advocate for the integration of refugee topics across counseling courses to promote social justice.
Keywords: refugees, barriers, multicultural competence, curricula, counselor educators
According to the American Counseling Association (ACA; 2014) Code of Ethics, counselors must gain multicultural competence to work with diverse populations and to advocate for equitable access to mental health care among underserved populations. Refugee populations represent a diverse group who face barriers to accessing mental health care in many societies (Satinsky et al., 2019). The UN Refugee Agency (formerly the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; 2025) defined a refugee as a person who flees their home country because of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a social group. The number of forcibly displaced people globally was 123.2 million people at the end of 2024, including 42.7 million refugees (The UN Refugee Agency, 2025). Despite the growing global need for counseling services among refugees, counselor training programs often do not include orientation to refugee issues in their counseling courses. The Council for the Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP; 2023) addresses migration in its standards within the definitions of cultural identity, diversity, and marginalized populations. However, the topic of migration is included explicitly within the standards when relevant to the impact of migration on family functioning for the marriage, couple, and family counseling specialization (CACREP, 2023). Counselors are currently facing a global humanitarian call to support refugee populations (Snow et al., 2021). The goal of this study was to explore approaches to counselor education that teach counseling students about refugee concerns and the barriers counselor educators face in training counseling students to develop this competence. The findings offer diverse strategies to facilitate multicultural competence among counseling students and illuminate the barriers to access, which the profession must address in order to respond to the current mental health crisis among the growing number of refugees globally.
Refugee Resettlement in the United States
The United States has admitted more than 3.1 million refugees since the passage of the Refugee Act in 1980 (U.S. Department of State, 2018). To address the unprecedented global refugee crisis, the United States raised its admissions ceiling to 125,000 for fiscal years 2023 and 2024. In the fiscal year 2023, the United States also launched a private sponsorship pathway for refugee arrivals called Welcome Corps. This allowed groups of citizens to sponsor and resettle refugees in their communities. The United States also established a pathway for migration to those fleeing the Ukrainian and Afghan crises and allowed eligibility for refugee services for those individuals in addition to a streamlined application process for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans to seek refuge. These actions yielded more opportunities for migrants to seek refuge and more communities across the country welcoming refugees outside of the traditional refugee resettlement structure. Traditionally, refugees are resettled in 48 states, with Washington, California, Texas, Ohio, and New York being the top resettlement areas (U.S. Department of State, 2018). The top 10 native languages that refugees living in the United States speak include Arabic, Nepali, Somali, Karen, Spanish, Swahili, Chaldean, Burmese, Armenian, and Farsi (U.S. Department of State, 2018). In fiscal year 2024, 100,034 refugees were admitted, with the top five countries of origin being the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Syria, and Burma. Although this was a record number for the traditional refugee resettlement program in the 21st century, it did fall short of the 125,000 ceiling set by the federal administration (Refugee Council USA, 2024). In January 2025, the federal administration closed both the traditional pathway for refugee resettlement and the parole application processes, as well as removing legal status for previously approved groups (Church World Service, 2025).
Mental Health Needs
Refugees are ethnically diverse and have varied experiences and backgrounds; however, they all share an increased risk for trauma-related distress and underuse of services (Bemak & Chung, 2021). One distinction between refugees and other migrants is that while immigrants tend to arrive in the United States healthier than the native-born population and then develop illnesses over time, refugees tend to enter the country less healthy than the native-born population (Pampati et al., 2018). Refugees have higher prevalence rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and depressive disorders (Bartholomew et al., 2021), and compared to other immigrants, refugees have the additional difficulties of pre-migratory traumatic experiences, grief, and loss of self-determination (Rometsch et al., 2020). Immigrants who choose to migrate and prepare for that transition face barriers such as culture shock and acculturation difficulties. However, refugees flee for their safety, without a choice and often without time to prepare, often leaving behind valuables and important documents. This loss of self-determination compounds in migration, as host countries often do not offer refugees the right to work, establish a lawful presence, or study. Much of the current literature related to the resettlement of refugees focuses on traumatic experiences before migration and leaves out the stressors involved after resettlement to a third country (Interiano-Shiverdecker et al., 2020). However, the daily stressors post-migration can be more distressing than war-related trauma and necessitate a social justice perspective to counseling (Kondili et al., 2022). These daily stressors may include acclimating to a new culture, language, and socioeconomic status, as well as navigating new social systems to access public benefits and health care. The focus of refugee services toward self-sufficiency as quickly as possible contrasts the policy of referring the most vulnerable refugees to resettlement, and the refugees’ years of experience having to depend on others for survival. Discrimination and prejudice are risks to overall well-being, affecting self-esteem, belonging, and self-determination (Interiano-Shiverdecker et al., 2020). The need for counseling services among refugee populations, particularly in resettlement to the United States, is well established.
Barriers to Counseling for Refugee Populations
Despite the need, refugees face various barriers to access for counseling services. Regardless of cultural background, refugees commonly experience barriers related to transportation, language, loss of social networks, financial difficulties, and limited access to resources (Tribe et al., 2019). Cultural barriers to seeking mental health counseling include shame about sharing personal or family concerns with those outside the family, a need to maintain a positive reputation within the community, and disbelief that talking about an issue could make it better (Hosseini et al., 2023). Refugees, who often have experienced oppression that breeds mistrust of people in power, may have concerns related to privacy and safety in counseling (Duden & Martins-Borges, 2021). With varying educational levels and interrupted education due to conflict, refugees may also lack knowledge about the availability and utility of counseling services (Duden & Martins-Borges, 2021).
Systemic issues also play a role, such as a misalignment between the mental health care system’s offerings and the specific needs of refugee communities (Bartholomew et al., 2021). Individualized Western conceptualizations of mental illness and its treatment are limited in being able to address the mental health needs of refugee groups (Bartholomew et al., 2021). Psychosocial distress presents itself with somatic symptoms such as headaches, backaches, and stomach pains among refugee groups, complicating identification and treatment of psychosocial disorders (O’Brien & Charura, 2023). Effective support requires a holistic and culturally sensitive approach that addresses not only specific psychiatric conditions but also the practical, social, and cultural contexts of their lives (Salami et al., 2019). In summary, refugees face a complex web of interconnected barriers to accessing mental health care. These include practical issues like cost and language, cultural factors such as stigma and differing illness beliefs, and systemic problems where the services offered do not match clients’ perceived needs. Overcoming these barriers requires a multifaceted approach that includes providing practical support, fostering cultural humility among clinicians, and adapting therapeutic models to be more responsive to the unique circumstances of refugee populations.
Multicultural Competence in Counseling Refugees
Ratts et al. (2016) created a multicultural counseling model that includes attitudes and beliefs, knowledge, skills, and action across the domains of interventions, relationships, client worldviews, and counselor self-awareness. Ratts et al. (2016) approached multicultural competence with an awareness of the need to include a broader concept of diversity, intersectionality of identities, and the role of counselors as social justice advocates. Cultural competence requires flexibility in accepting individual conceptualizations and needs rather than knowledge of a set of generalized facts about a cultural group (Cabell et al., 2024). To work with refugees effectively, counselors must have a range of skills, including navigating boundaries, advocating, responding to trauma, facilitating acculturation, and working with interpreters (Atiyeh & Gray, 2022). Training and preparation of counselors in their master’s-level courses are key to laying the foundation for multicultural competence development to work with refugee clients. This training also extends toward multicultural competence with other populations (Atiyeh & Gray, 2022). Although it is understood that counselors need to be culturally competent social justice advocates, knowing how to support trainees in learning and demonstrating those skills in real-world contexts is less understood (Kuo et al.,2020). Professional development training on specific cultures is important to further develop multicultural competence beyond master’s-level training (Cabell et al., 2024). Much of the training provided in master’s counseling programs relies on a traditional model of counseling utilizing Western-based theories, and promoting refugee mental health requires incorporating a collaborative and social justice approach (Kondili et al., 2022). Counseling programs may be deficient in preparing counselors who are knowledgeable about their clients’ worldviews (Damra & Qa’aymeh, 2024). The intersection of the high need for counseling services, the systemic barriers preventing effective and culturally responsive counseling, and the limited competence among counselors poses a serious health equity issue that the profession must address.
Method
The purpose of the study was to explore the ways that counselor educators address refugee concerns in counseling courses in order to highlight barriers and resources for counselor education. The research question was: What are the experiences of counselor educators who address refugee concerns in master’s-level counseling courses? I conducted a qualitative descriptive analysis study utilizing an open-ended qualitative online survey and a focus group session. This approach is appropriate when exploring participants’ experiences and perceptions from a naturalistic orientation (Sandelowski, 2010). As the current literature demonstrates a need for competent mental health counseling for refugee populations, further investigation into the barriers that counselor educators experience in training students to work with this population and how they navigate these barriers is important. Qualitative description offers a starting point to explore how counselor educators incorporate refugee concerns in the classroom at the master’s level. The survey included questions related to which courses cover refugee concerns, what strategies they use, what barriers they face in doing so, and the training they have had related to refugee concerns. The study design followed a descriptive content analysis with the intent of describing how counselor educators may be teaching students in the classroom how to work with refugee clients, the resources they utilize, and the challenges they face in doing so. This qualitative approach can be useful in identifying and sharing data in a way that is relevant to a specific audience (Sandelowski, 2000).
Study Design
I shared an online survey with open-ended questions utilizing Qualtrics on listservs and social media groups for counselor educators. These outlets for recruitment were appropriate to seek out counselor educators who self-identified as incorporating refugee concerns into their master’s-level counseling courses. After an initial analysis of the survey data, I posted a focus group meeting opportunity on the same listservs. In the focus group meeting, initial themes were shared, and participants were asked to react to and expand on the results. The transcript for the focus group meeting was coded using in-vivo coding. Individual codes were grouped into categories and those were grouped under major themes.
Participants
Participant inclusion criteria included counselor educators who teach master’s-level counseling courses and address refugee concerns in those courses. I recruited participants online through emails to a listserv of counselor educators and social media groups of counselor educators. These included CESNET and social media groups for the NBCC Foundation Minority Fellowship Program recipients and alumni. An invitation to participate in the focus group meeting was sent to the same groups. Eleven participants completed the open-ended survey and four counselor educators participated in the focus group meeting. Demographic data were not collected as part of the survey or focus group questions in order to preserve anonymity, as the community of counselor educators with experience incorporating refugee topics in their courses may be quite small, and demographic data may reduce their openness to provide in-depth responses.
Procedure
This study received ethical approval from the host institution’s IRB. The emailed recruitment message included a research information sheet explaining the research and participation expectations. It also included a link to complete the survey using Qualtrics. There were no planned follow-up procedures after the survey. Eleven participants completed the open-ended survey, which included the following questions:
- In what classes and during which topic areas do you include refugee concerns in your counseling courses?
- What activities or resources do you use to teach counseling students about refugee concerns?
- What barriers or challenges do you face when teaching counseling students about refugee concerns?
- How have you received training or education regarding refugee concerns, if any?
These questions were developed to respond to the research question of: What are the experiences of counselor educators who address refugee concerns in master’s-level counseling courses? The questions were also framed to lead to practical resources and techniques for counselor educators to utilize within their courses. I grouped responses to these questions into descriptive categories. I submitted and obtained approval for an amendment to the initial IRB approval to obtain focus group data to expand on emerging themes from the survey. I emailed a recruitment message with an edited research information sheet detailing focus group procedures and an invitation to a virtual meeting on Microsoft Teams, which four participants attended. Participants had the choice to be off-camera during the meeting. The meeting was recorded for transcription, and the recording was deleted after the transcription was created. I presented these to the focus group participants for elaboration and description of the emerging themes. I shared the initial results from the survey data and asked participants to share what stood out to them about these findings. I also asked the focus group participants the same questions from the survey. The focus group meeting was semi-structured with an in-depth discussion following the participants’ responses to allow for a deeper discussion of the research question that the open-ended questionnaire could not offer (Bengtsson, 2016). The transcript of the focus group meeting was analyzed and coded in vivo. Those codes were grouped into categories and then organized into themes.
Data Analysis
I downloaded Qualtrics responses in an Excel spreadsheet and reviewed them several times following a content analysis approach (Sandelowski, 2000). I then read through the data two times before conducting in-vivo coding. A code was written next to the relevant data on the Excel spreadsheet. Similar codes were then grouped together in Microsoft Word. While staying close to the data, it was organized into categories (Prasad, 2019). I organized the data into categories so that the description could lead to meaningful implications to which the focus group participants could react. After the focus group, the meeting was transcribed automatically using Microsoft Teams and analyzed separately from the survey data. This analysis included the same process of reading through the transcript twice initially, then a round of initial in-vivo coding within an Excel spreadsheet, then grouping similar codes into a table on Microsoft Word, and finally grouping those categories into larger themes.
Researcher Positionality and Reflexivity
A key element of rigor in qualitative research is researcher reflexivity (Olmos-Vega et al., 2023). While inherent biases, subjectivities, and power imbalance inevitably inform data analysis and influence the research process, sharing the positionalities of the researcher is an important first step in trustworthiness (Olmos-Vega et al., 2023). Olmos-Vega et al. (2023) defined reflexivity as a dynamic and collaborative process that involves self-critique and context evaluation by first making positionality explicit. I am an assistant professor in the counselor education department at a public urban university offering CACREP-accredited master’s-level programs in clinical mental health, school counseling, and clinical rehabilitation counseling. I also have over 10 years of experience providing counseling and employment services with refugee populations and supervising such programming. I approach my clinical and academic work from a constructivist and existential perspective in which knowledge and experiences are co-constructed through meaning-making and perspective-taking. I have not personally experienced migration, forced or otherwise, but have grown up around immigrant communities as the child of an immigrant. I conducted this study to bring attention to the need for counseling services for refugee communities and the struggles faced and strategies employed by educators when training counseling students to do so. This is the perspective with which I approached study design and data interpretation. I also developed reflexivity throughout the process by checking initial interpretations from survey data with the focus group participants and connecting themes with the quotes from the data.
Results
The initial survey results are outlined in Table 1. Focus group participants discussed their reactions to these responses and expanded on them in their own answers to the same questions. The analysis of the transcript yielded 89 codes that were grouped into 11 categories and three themes.
Table 1
Survey Results
| Courses |
Strategies |
Barriers |
Training for Educators |
| Diversity |
Guest Speakers |
Lack of student interest |
Conferences |
| Ethics |
Videos |
Not relevant |
Articles |
| Family |
Articles |
Limited time |
Lived experience |
| Trauma |
Poems |
Not covered in textbooks |
Consultation |
| Group |
Case Studies |
Political reasons |
Workshops |
| Career |
Student Presentations |
Too complex |
None |
| School |
Textbook |
|
|
| Internship |
|
|
|
| Advocacy |
|
|
|
Description of Courses
The survey results indicated that refugee concerns may be addressed in courses throughout the master’s program, not just in a singular course focused on multicultural diversity. These courses included an introductory course on diversity topics in addition to ethical practice, family counseling, treating trauma, groupwork, career counseling, school counseling, clinical courses, and a course on advocacy strategies. This is in line with guidance within the counseling literature on facilitating multicultural competence across the curriculum. Multicultural competence is too complex and important to be limited to only one class. Doing so may allow students to grasp some of the complexity involved in working with refugees and develop their counseling skills to work with intersectional identities. However, focus group participants were struck by the lack of standardization to how counselor educators address refugee concerns in their courses, highlighting the variability in responses to which courses include the topic. This variability also comes up in the ways that counselor educators approach training students to work with refugee clients.
Description of Strategies
Counselor educators also broach the topic in various ways: allowing students to bring it up, inviting a guest speaker, or having a discussion led by the educator. Participants shared that it comes up in courses because students bring up the topic through their papers, presentations, or case presentations, if they happen to be working with a refugee client. Participants might bring refugee concerns into the classroom as they discuss current news stories or events.
The content presented by counselor educators included peer-reviewed articles, student presentations, case studies, and textbooks. Participants also utilize creative approaches that highlight the lived experiences of refugees, such as poetry or film. Guest speakers share their own clinical experiences working with refugees in the field. Focus group participants shared specific examples, such as incorporating case studies in various classes. One focus group participant described a paper assignment given to students in which they needed to analyze an ethical issue relevant to a population facing racism or oppression; some students selected a concern facing refugees. Another participant led an internship experience at a local shelter for migrants and trained students to work specifically with this population through experiential training and weekly supervision. Although this participant described requiring students to have a traditional counseling experience before participating in this internship and the importance of having balance in skills for both conventional in-office counseling and nontraditional counseling conducted in shelters, they stated, “It can be very, very difficult to get them to understand that counseling does not have to happen in an office in 50 minutes.” This participant identified that in practice, “These are not the skills that they are taught in the classes . . . there’s a lot of retraining . . . unteaching and untraining can be a barrier and a challenge.” This discussion of strategies utilizing experiential learning quickly turned into a discussion of challenges and barriers in attempting to fit work with refugee clients into the current paradigm of training counselors, which often relies on Western theories of counseling. Another participant in the focus group reflected on how difficult it was to adapt to working with refugee clients after graduating from a master’s program, even while sharing a language and cultural background with clients. They stated, “When I graduated as a master’s student, I went into an agency to work with refugees, and at first, just implementing everything we learned was sometimes damaging.” Allowing for supportive opportunities to practice throughout the master’s curriculum allows students to have safe opportunities to practice before graduation. One participant offered that they “do a lot of shadowing” throughout their practicum experience. Another participant agreed: “I think that that’s where that immersion experience is going to be critical, and immersion doesn’t have to be going to a refugee camp. It could be through different means.”
Description of Barriers
Participants also identified challenges they may face while trying to educate counseling students in the classroom on how to work with refugee clients. These challenges included a perception of the lack of relevance of refugee concerns, limited opportunities to teach students how to work with refugee clients, and the complexity involved in refugee concerns. Some of the quotes from participants illuminated the challenges in teaching counseling students to work with refugees. The direct quotes that support these themes are listed in Table 2.
Table 2
Challenges to Incorporating Refugee Concerns
| Theme |
Quotes |
| Lack of Relevance |
“Some students don’t seem interested or think that they don’t want to work with that population.”
“Students don’t see the need to learn about it.”
“I think opportunities to work with refugees are limited in our area and so it isn’t a ‘pressing’ concern. Doesn’t mean it isn’t important, but we focus on the concerns that our students will likely face in their service provision at higher rates.” |
| Limited Opportunity |
“Large amount of topics in learning objectives to cover over a semester.”
“I don’t have a lot of time dedicated to the topic.”
“It doesn’t appear in many of the counseling texts as an area to address.” |
| Complexity
|
“Many students lack knowledge about the refugee experience and [have a] misunderstanding of the difference between refugees and immigrants.”
“Students think it’s too hard.”
“My state doesn’t want educators discussing ‘diversity’ topics.”
“Their previous political beliefs can be an obstacle.”
“Addressing this topic as it relates to intersectional identity, and culturally responsive treatment knowledge and resources.” |
Focus group participants elaborated on these themes. The second point from the survey results that stood out to them, after noticing the variability with which counselor educators were discussing refugees, was the sense that competence to work with refugee clients was not important or relevant to students. They made sense of this as being from a place of experiencing the privilege of not having to be aware of the level of forced displacement in the world. One focus group participant highlighted that this ignorance has consequences: “The privilege of not needing to be competent is harmful to communities.” Participants also explored this lack of interest and/or relevance further, stating: “It takes work to gain the competence, and if it’s not something that is of interest, folks are not seeking it out.” The underutilization of mental health services for refugees is further exacerbated by the lack of culturally competent counselors. This lack of interest may also be fueled by stereotypes about the population. Focus group participants shared their perceptions that “a lot of people are afraid of getting into it because of whether it’s like the competence piece or fear of vicarious traumatization or . . . I guess just like lack of interest” and “working with refugees, there is this . . . view of this population as broken. So there is a fear that either I’m going to do harm or not be helpful enough.” Another potential source for this ambivalence is also economic. Focus group participants discussed that there “isn’t a lot of money in it” when referring to working with refugee clients and that it is often grant-funded work in community agencies. They all discussed how counseling students are often entering the profession seeking to work in private practice, providing services reimbursed by medical insurance rather than counseling work in community settings.
Counselor educators are also affected by the limited time, resources, and applicability of current counseling theories to be able to incorporate the complexity needed when addressing refugee concerns in counseling courses. Focus group participants shared that counselor educators themselves “lack the competence to talk about this population” or “don’t feel comfortable enough as educators.” The textbooks used in counseling courses also do not provide enough information on the topic to help guide the discussion in class. One participant mentioned, and others reiterated it multiple times during the focus group, that “we don’t have more than a chapter.” Educators then must seek out additional resources or adapt existing approaches, with one participant sharing that “our counseling theories are not really applying to this population, so we have to spend a lot of time either adapting them or unlearning them.”
Despite these barriers, focus group participants shared multiple reasons why counselor educators and counselors need to persist in developing competence. They all highlighted the scenarios in which counselors may encounter issues related to forced migration or clients from refugee backgrounds. Participants shared that “every border university should have really solid training and education for this population,” and “if you don’t work with refugees, you might have a client that has a family member or friend from that background,” and “in the school setting, like children have to go to school, and so they’re finding themselves being faced with working with refugees.” Participants also shared that they learned a tremendous amount from their refugee clients, deepening their own skills and ability to adapt: “Learning experience for me is like you learn from them probably more than they learn from you,” and “you have to really be flexible to learn from them as much as they’re learning from you to be able to be helpful.” Participants also shared how rewarding the work has been and how they have seen students benefit from “the joy and the reward of working with this population.” Another participant shared that “once they’ve experienced this work, they just love it. There is so much joy in it.”
Description of Training Opportunities
Participants also shared opportunities they had to learn about refugee concerns as educators. These included conferences, reading journal articles, attending workshops, work experiences, and personal lived experiences. Participants shared specific workshops that were useful, such as the Trauma Systems Therapy for Refugees training, Global Mental Health training from Johns Hopkins University, and consultation with local refugee resettlement agencies. These may be a starting place for counselor educators who want to gain training before integrating refugee concerns into their courses. The study findings included several resources available to counselor educators, such as case studies and experiential learning opportunities.
Incorporating refugee concerns throughout master’s-level counseling courses may be useful in facilitating multicultural competence among counselors to work with refugees and other diverse populations. The concern about whether teaching counselors to work with refugees is relevant is striking, given the high need for mental health services among this population and the limited access to those services. Given this need for mental health services and the ethical mandate for counselors to work toward access to mental health care for underserved groups, counselor educators can and must do more to overcome the challenges and complexity involved in facilitating multicultural competence among counseling students.
Discussion
The purpose of the study was to explore the ways that counselor educators address refugee concerns in counseling courses to highlight barriers and resources for counselor education. The research question was: What are the experiences of counselor educators who address refugee concerns in master’s-level counseling courses? Counselor educators who do so incorporate refugee concerns throughout the curriculum using various methods while navigating challenges of complexity, limited time and resources, and potential disinterest. The study results demonstrate the importance of incorporating refugee representation throughout the curriculum at the master’s level. The results suggest various approaches, building on current literature that advocates for opportunities to engage in service learning or immersive experiences. In the following sections, I share resources from the extant literature. These experiential opportunities build students’ abilities to be flexible in “unlearning” traditional theories and serving diverse populations. The diversity of approaches reflects an opportunity for flexibility and creativity in classrooms as well as a threat to the standardized inclusion of multicultural competence to work with refugees across counseling. Part of the variability in how counselor educators are incorporating refugee concerns in their classes stems from the lack of intentionality with which it is addressed. For example, educators often wait for students to bring it up themselves rather than purposefully incorporating refugee concerns in the classroom. CACREP may more intentionally address forced migration and its effect on mental health to offer a framework for its inclusion in master’s-level courses and textbooks. A thorough list of competencies for working with refugee clients and ways of assessing and building these competencies could inform educational approaches. The challenges faced by counselor educators suggest future areas of advocacy needed for our profession to meet the counseling needs of refugee populations.
The Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies offered a framework advocating for counselors to understand the social context of their clients, intentionally broach concerns related to power and privilege, and advocate for systemic change (Ratts et al., 2016). For counselors to be prepared to utilize this framework with refugee clients, they must have basic knowledge of the sociopolitical context globally, an ability to confront their own biases and attitudes toward refugees, as well as skills to broach topics of power and privilege with refugee clients and to advocate for equitable access to counseling services. This study provides findings and resources counselor educators may utilize in their educational spaces, facilitating this competence for master’s-level counseling students.
Resources for Counselor Educators
Participants discussed various methods such as utilizing film and literature, experiential learning, and case studies. They shared the importance of intentionally exposing students to migrant stories and experiences at the master’s level. Existing literature provides a few examples of assignments and useful resources. These might be adapted to different courses across the curriculum.
Incorporating literature and film in counseling courses may facilitate self-awareness and empathy. These also allow for experiential learning before the clinical courses. The United Nations (2022) published an article listing recent films on refugee stories that included Flee, Simple as Water, Encanto, Captains of Za’atari, and Three Songs for Benazir. The Penguin Book of Migration Literature presents a diverse collection of fiction and poetry from migrant perspectives throughout history. Houseknecht and Swank (2019) recommended asking students to search “interview with a refugee” on YouTube and identify a video that is at least 10 minutes long and write a reaction paper as if the interviewee was their client.
Experiential learning can encourage students to actively experiment and then bring back their learning and reflection into the classroom (Houseknecht & Swank, 2019). Service learning components within courses improved multicultural and social justice knowledge and skills (Midgett & Doumas, 2016). A cultural immersion and social action project may be useful in developing multicultural competence and social justice advocacy competence (Pechak et al., 2020). Service learning early in the program, while students are developing their conceptualizations of the counseling profession, may be more beneficial for students to gain social justice and multicultural competence skills (Midgett & Doumas, 2016). Students need applied experiences within the community to develop these skills (Midgett & Doumas, 2016). Houseknecht and Swank (2019) described a role-play activity to simulate counseling with an interpreter where the students who act as counselors and clients write their responses and the student acting as an interpreter reads them.
Participants shared the use of case studies, suggesting that those who have experience with refugees may build them from their experience. Case studies can provide an opportunity for students to conceptually apply skills such as diagnosis, treatment planning, case management, career counseling, and ethical decision-making. Snow et al. (2021) recommended the website iamanimmigrant.com as a source of immigrant stories. Kondili et al. (2022) presented two case studies that incorporate a community and advocacy approach. Case studies can be presented in various courses that allow for intersectional identities where immigration status is one factor that interacts with other aspects of the client’s social identities, the counselor’s social identities, and the overall context. Snow et al. (2021) also presented a useful case study and guide for counselor educators on ways to incorporate refugee concerns throughout various counseling courses.
Study Limitations
The current study contributes to a deeper understanding of how counselor educators may attempt to incorporate refugee concerns and the challenges they face. However, it has some limitations. One main limitation was the lack of any demographic data on participants, which limits the information on context, such as the location in which the participants are teaching and their professional experience in the field. An online survey design was chosen because it may allow for more candid responses through anonymity and privacy (Blease et al., 2023). It also allowed participants to complete the study on their own time at their convenience, and it ensured complete anonymity. However, it did not allow further probes to gain further description or meaning behind the survey statements. The focus group partially filled that gap. The number of participants across both data collection methods was low, potentially because of the low number of counselor educators who incorporate refugee concerns into their courses.
Future Research
The leaders of the counseling profession need to make it more likely that refugee clients can find counselors who can understand refugee experiences, promote mental health literacy among refugee communities, demonstrate respect, and assess clients’ understanding of mental health (Snow et al., 2021). Counselor educators have a responsibility to train counselors to become advocates with a social justice orientation (Clark et al., 2022). Further research can support counselor educators as they endeavor to train counselors and advocates addressing the refugee crisis. Theories of mental illnesses and their treatment that are indigenous to the populations served need to be identified and utilized within counseling. The need to continuously adapt Western models poses an accessibility barrier for non-Western groups. Building on the limitations of this study, future qualitative studies may further investigate the rewards and challenges related to incorporating refugee concerns into counseling classrooms. Quantitative studies could identify the effects of training counselors to work with refugees on students’ overall competence and the accessibility of counseling services to refugee populations and other underserved groups. The impact of the political environment devaluing and silencing equity approaches in education poses new barriers. This was a point that survey participants made but focus group participants did not discuss. This may be because they were not experiencing that barrier at the time. Research should explore how counselor educators navigate these challenges and their threats to our professional values. As demographic data was not collected for this study, further research could explore the connection between professional identity and context and their approaches to educating counselors on working with refugee clients.
Conclusion
Advocating for social justice and positive social change is an aspect of ethical professional identity for counselors and counselor educators (ACA, 2014). Increasing the competence of counseling professionals would make counseling more accessible to refugees, currently an underserved group. Professional counselors risk losing perspective on the societal and group dynamics of wellness when they provide mental health services in individualized settings. However, a commitment to equity, justice, and beneficence is a part of counselors’ professional ethics and identity (ACA, 2014). As health professionals, counselors must advocate for conditions that promote wellness within communities. Therefore, developing advocacy skills and a commitment to social justice is crucial to establishing cultural competence and ethical practice with refugee clients. With the rising numbers of refugees globally, there is a greater need for counselors who are trained and competent to counsel refugee populations; it may become more likely that counselors will encounter refugee clients in their careers. Counselors may need to grow their knowledge base, skills, and awareness related to refugee issues. Counselor preparation programs and supervisors play an important role in facilitating that competence. Further training and research in this area will support the multicultural and social justice competence of counselors to meet the growing need globally and in the United States.
Conflict of Interest and Funding Disclosure
The authors reported no conflict of interest
or funding contributions for the development
of this manuscript.
References
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Shadin Atiyeh, PhD, NCC, ACS, LPC, CCC, CRC, is an assistant professor at Wayne State University and was a 2017 Doctoral Fellow in Mental Health Counseling with the NBCCF Minority Fellowship Program. Correspondence may be addressed to Shadin Atiyeh, 5425 Gullen Mall, Detroit, MI 48202, shadin.atiyeh@wayne.edu.
Mar 18, 2025 | Volume 15 - Issue 1
Jessi Pham, Tiffany Perry-Wilson, Kevlyn Holmes, Grace Schroeder, Ana Reyes, Michelle Pollok
Decolonial research helps us move away from extractive research methodologies that maintain the wounded subject position and legitimize oppressive practices. Additionally, decolonial research challenges dominant Eurocentric paradigms that have historically shaped the counseling profession. Thus, we offer this article to demonstrate an approach to decolonizing research practices. This article discusses (a) the limits of traditional research approaches, (b) a demonstration of decolonized research methods in action, and (c) considerations for counselor educators and researchers. In alignment with our goal of shifting the research paradigm away from dominant and often oppressive practices, we use a collective and relatable voice that speaks to both our personal identities and our unity as a team working toward the decolonialization of academic research.
Keywords: decolonizing research, research paradigm, oppressive practices, wounded subject position, counselor educators
Research, particularly within the counseling profession, has historically perpetuated oppressive structures, contributing to the pathologization and marginalization of non-White communities (American Psychological Association [APA], 2021; Singh et al., 2021). Traditional research methodologies often reinforce these power imbalances, reducing marginalized individuals to their experiences of trauma and oppression. In response, there is a growing movement toward decolonial and liberatory research practices that aim to center the voices and experiences of marginalized communities, fostering empowerment and healing (Goodman et al., 2015; Neville et al., 2024; Shin, 2016).
As an example of this, we presented and discussed a photovoice exhibit at the 2024 National Board for Certified Counselors Foundation (NBCCF) Bridging the Gap Symposium, which sought to share the healing experiences of nine queer womxn of color (QWoC). Grounded in intersectionality theory and photovoice methodology, our presentation aimed to highlight the strengths and resilience of QWoC, moving away from deficit-based narratives. This article will discuss the background of our decolonial research approach, the overview and positionality statements of our presentation, the reflections of presenters and attendees, and important considerations for counselor educators and researchers committed to decolonizing their practices.
History of Harm Caused by Research
Mental health research has, directly and indirectly, contributed to hegemonic science, harming marginalized communities by pathologizing anything that has strayed from White, Eurocentric standards (APA, 2021; Singh et al., 2021). Examples of this pathologizing range from the inclusion of homosexuality as a mental disorder in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to the fictitious diagnosis of drapteomania, a type of “mania” that drove enslaved persons to run from their oppressors (Auguste et al., 2023; Ginicola et al., 2017). Mental health professionals used psychological research to support the segregation of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and the “civilizing programs” that attempted to eradicate Indigenous people’s culture (APA, 2021; Auguste et al., 2023). The mental health field continues to use psychological assessments formulated by and for White cisgender heterosexual men, which in turn contributes to the pathologization and oppression of BIPOC communities and other marginalized groups (Auguste et al., 2023; Lee & Boykins, 2022). All research operates within oppressive structures, some of which include the influences of White supremacy and heterosexism, which impact how we design, conceptualize, analyze, and disseminate research that often informs our clinical and teaching practices (Goodman et al., 2015).
Moving Away From the Wounded Subject Position
Similarly, most of the existing literature on LGBTQ BIPOC solely focuses on the pain and trauma of discrimination and oppression—inadvertently keeping research attendees in the wounded subject position (Brown, 1995). The wounded subject position reduces LGBTQ BIPOC to their experiences of discrimination and oppression. Furthermore, the wounded subject position promotes oppression by reinforcing existing power relations (Hudson & Romanelli, 2020) and deficit-based narratives. Consequently, our work moves away from deficit-based research questions and methodologies that reinforce oppressive and extractive research practices. Our work infuses the work of various Indigenous, anti-racist, anti-oppressive, liberatory, and decolonial scholars (e.g., Audrey Lorde, Dr. Jennifer Mullan, Paulo Freire, Dr. Zuri Tau) to intentionally move away from extractive research methodologies.
Decolonizing Research
Colonization is foundational to many existing research practices that extract from marginalized communities to systemically stratify the value of knowledge based on dominant narratives and structures such as White supremacy. These colonial practices are highlighted by research that benefits from exerting authority and enacting an expert position to extract knowledge from marginalized communities without reciprocity and advocacy (Tau, 2023). Further examples of colonization in research and academia include the use of diagnostic criteria, normality, and baseline behaviors informed by White cisgender heterosexual men to pathologize BIPOC communities; there is also the issue of the predominance of Whiteness in academic spaces, including editorial staff in publication journals (Mullan, 2023). Research and academia also play a role in maintaining colonial and oppressive structures by legitimizing oppressive practices under the guise of various savior narratives (Smith, 2021).
A decolonized research approach may include many practices and values, such as critical reflexivity, dialogue, and catalytic validity (Lather, 1986). One example of critical reflexivity is writing a positionality statement, which involves critical reflection on the various domains of our lives in which we have or lack privilege. Dialogue includes conversing on how our identities impact our work and interactions with community members; in doing so, researchers recognize the power dynamic between researcher and co-researcher and try to centralize consent, mutuality, autonomy, respect, care, and relationships. Additionally, catalytic validity refers to the degree to which collaboration with community members energizes, revitalizes, and fosters the development of critical consciousness. This sociopolitical concept involves the ability to identify and analyze oppressive social, economic, and political forces, and to take action to address them (Freire, 1972; Lather, 1986). By emphasizing catalytic validity, researchers are held accountable to the underlying goals of decolonial and liberatory work.
Further examples of decolonial practices in research include advocacy, power sharing, and rituals (Keikelame & Swartz, 2019; Reyes et al., 2024; Zavala, 2013). Research has the potential to serve as a platform to elevate advocacy and support existing grassroots efforts, creating spaces for and by the community (Zavala, 2013). Researchers can also share their findings with stakeholders and others with the power to make systemic changes to create more equitable conditions for marginalized communities. Researchers who intend to work with marginalized communities must also examine the power differentials between researchers and the populations they hope to learn from. Power sharing is an important practice in decolonial research, in which researchers involve community members in various points of the research process and continually consult and check for their consent while encouraging and honoring autonomy (Keikelame & Swartz, 2019). Decolonial research and advocacy efforts can often be very draining; thus, Reyes et al. (2024) recommend engaging in rituals to remain attuned and grounded and to help connect to material more deeply.
The Liberatory Research Collective
We are an innovative and collaborative research collective, dedicated to pushing the bounds of traditional research methodologies by advancing liberatory, anti-oppressive, and decolonial research in the counseling profession. We started as a university research lab, but chose to honor our growth as a collective of folks dedicated to decolonial and anti-oppressive work by operating independently of any institution that might uphold or be influenced by oppressive and colonial structures. We evolved into the Liberatory Research Collective, comprised of scholars, educators, counselors, and community members from across the country. We aim to co-create a space where anyone interested in research, particularly with marginalized communities, can develop the skills needed to engage in transformative and decolonial research. We challenge the status quo and ask critical questions like: 1) Who has the power to design and conduct research? 2) Who are the researchers? and 3) What qualifies them to engage with marginalized and targeted communities?
Demonstration of Decolonized Research Methods in Action
Our dedication to decolonizing the counseling profession through clinical and research practices is a profound testament to our integrity and purpose. It is a beacon of hope and inspiration, demonstrating how research can be a powerful tool for healing and resistance. One notable example of our impact was a photovoice exhibit, “Through Our Lens: Queer Womxn of Color’s Experiences of Healing and Liberation,” which we curated and hosted in honor of National Coming Out Day (October 11, 2023). This exhibit was part of a photovoice project where we partnered with nine QWoC to explore and celebrate their experiences of healing inside and outside of counseling. The exhibit highlighted and celebrated the diverse ways in which QWoC find healing and resist dominant narratives, both within and beyond the realm of counseling, through the lens of QWoC who beautifully captured their personal stories of resilience and healing, illustrating a narrative often overlooked—a narrative that celebrates their strength and wisdom. We believe this exhibition touched the hearts of all 169 guests and broadened our collective understanding and appreciation for the experiences of QWoC.
This exhibit is an example of our work as researchers committed to pushing the bounds of traditional research methods that have historically oppressed, weaponized, and erased the experiences of marginalized communities. Our work is our love letter to all marginalized communities and an invitation for counselors and counselor educators to practice decolonial and liberatory approaches.
Photovoice Methodology
Photovoice, introduced by Wang and Burris (1997) and grounded in critical consciousness, feminist theory, and documentary photography, extends Paulo Freire’s (1972) notion that visual images can foster critical community reflection. The objectives of photovoice are to showcase the strengths and concerns of marginalized communities, stimulate dialogue about community issues and strength through group discussions of photographs, and spur engagement in advocacy by reaching policymakers and other key stakeholders (Wang & Burris, 1997). Photovoice invites marginalized groups to articulate their perspectives through photography, fostering autonomy and enabling self-advocacy for political and social reforms that address their communal priorities.
Following this philosophy, our research collective advocates for collaborative partnerships with co-researchers to define and address salient identities and issues affecting them. The term “co-researcher” is used here as an indicator for the individuals or community members who are conducting the research with us. The use of this term is a liberatory and decolonial approach, where the power is held not solely by the researcher but also by the community. We continue to define and redefine the terms queer and womxn of color to connect varying perspectives of these terms that are central to our work. Queer is a term with a harmful history that many within the LGBTQIA2S+ community have reclaimed to define someone who lives outside the margins of the socially constructed confines of romantic, sexual, and gender identity, as well as gender expression (The LGBTQ Community Center of the Desert, n.d.). Some members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community also use the term queer as a political stance. Womxn of color refers to people of the global majority who identify with the socially constructed womxn identity; the “e” in “women” is replaced by an “x” to include transgender, genderqueer, non-binary, genderfluid, gender non-conforming, and/or gender expansive people (Kendall, 2008; McConnell et al., 2016).
Through Our Lens Photovoice Project
In June 2023, we started recruitment for the photovoice project to find between eight and 15 self-identified QWoC who were willing to actively participate in this project by 1) meeting with researchers to build rapport, discuss their participation in the project, and obtain verbal consent; 2) taking between eight and 15 pictures that represent their experience(s) of healing inside and outside of counseling as a QWoC; 3) completing the Photovoice Reflection Form and Interview Reflection Form, and participating in three meetings (two of which were required and a third which was optional if they were interested in providing researchers with additional feedback); and 4) actively identifying and listing ways to take action and/or advocate and support with the exploration of how we shared the research findings.
2024 Bridging the Gap Symposium Presentation Overview
Our presentation at the 2024 Bridging the Gap Symposium, titled “Through Our Lens: Exhibiting Decolonized Research and Clinical Practice in Action,” was created as a means to bring our photovoice exhibit to the 2024 NBCCF Symposium while allowing attendees to explore the healing practices of QWoC inside and outside of counseling from a decolonial perspective. By encouraging attendees to explore the experiences of QWoC in our exhibit, we hoped to shed light on how taking a decolonized and liberatory approach to research fosters healing and empowerment for BIPOC co-researchers and researchers. This presentation was intended to showcase the transformative power of decolonized research and provide tangible insights for integrating these practices into counseling. Attendees had the opportunity to engage in a gallery experience and discussions surrounding decolonized research and positionality, as well as how insights gleaned from our partnership with QWoC can be applied to counseling and research practices.
Our Rationale
Traditional counseling methods often fail to address the unique tapestry of cultural, societal, and personal challenges faced by BIPOC individuals, particularly QWoC (Reyes et al., 2022). By integrating a decolonial framework, counselors can create more inclusive and effective healing environments. Our presentation explored various strategies used by QWoC to navigate their healing journeys, emphasizing the importance of cultural sensitivity, community support, and personal empowerment.
Preparing for Our Presentation
In preparation for our presentation, our group met in one of our hotel rooms to assemble easels while reflecting on our salient identities, emotions, concerns, and hopes for the session. During this meeting, we practiced our positionality statements and reflected deeply on what it meant to present the healing experiences of nine QWoC when members of our research team had insider and outsider identities related to the QWoC label. We discussed what it meant for some of our White and cisgender male identities to influence the presentation material and potentially impact presentation attendees. For example, my (sixth author Michelle Pollok) reflective process included dialogue with my colleagues on what our privileges mean and how they can serve or harm the communities we work with. Much of this dialogue focused on the process of being a vessel for QWoC to share their creative methods, showcasing their experiences of healing. For me, this was a crucial piece of this project, as I was cognizant of speaking for, or over, our co-researchers, knowing that I do not understand their experience as BIPOC. I spoke with my colleague (fourth author Grace Schroeder) about our Whiteness in relation to this project and our goals of de-centering it while also sharing our queer identities with our co-researchers and reflecting on what that connection means to us.
We also took the time to acknowledge and explore our insider (shared) identities, some of which are Queer, womxn, and BIPOC, through positionality statements, identity work, and dialogue. For example, I (second author Tiffany Perry-Wilson) consist of multiple minoritized, intersecting identities, such as being a Queer cis-woman within the African Diaspora. I share commonalities with our co-researchers who identify as QWoC themselves, but it is important for me to keep in mind that we are not a monolithic group; we are a beautiful mix of diverse beings. This shared identity is undeniable, but our interpretations or the meaning that we provide to our experiences will forever be uniquely ours as individuals. Maintaining this awareness was part of my reflective process to be sure that my understanding did not override the experiences of our co-researchers.
Our conversation also included how our areas of mixed privilege intersect with our work. Although I (first author Jessi Pham) may share identities such as bisexual and Asian American, I often reflect on how my cisgender male identity impacts my interpretation and influence on our work. I question what it means for a cisgender man to present material created alongside QWoC and find it important to draw from shared commonalities while acknowledging when my privilege may stand in the way. I recognize that even with shared and unshared identities, there are experiences that I can only hope to understand through listening and empathy. As my colleagues state above, the identities I share in common with co-researchers are not monoliths, and I am also merely a vessel through which we share our collective and unique experiences.
Additionally, from a mentoring standpoint, I (fifth author and faculty lead Ana Reyes) encouraged us to explore and release colonial and White supremacist ideals regarding how we should “present as professionals” by asking how and from whom we learned to present and how to dress for “conferences, symposiums, or professional events.” The invitation to release internalized colonial and White supremacist ideals empowered us to present in a way that felt authentic to who we are and the co-researchers whose stories and wisdom we were sharing. We stressed the importance of taking a non-expert role, emphasizing that we are merely the vessels of knowledge and information shared by co-researchers.
Materials Used
Our presentation materials consisted of several poster boards and easels set up in various areas around the room. Each poster board displayed a physical print of a co-researcher’s name, photo, caption, title, and image description. Other materials included pride flag stickers, mini bubble wands, letter-writing materials and envelopes, various crystals and stones, and burlap sacks for attendees to create and take home a blend of herbs with myriad healing properties, including lavender, rose, rosemary, and eucalyptus.
Our Symposium Presentation
We began our session by sharing our positionality statements, broaching our intersecting identities, and centering our relationships with ourselves, each other, and as presenters in academia. We engaged in dialogue with attendees regarding our intentions as researchers, the presence of Whiteness in decolonized research, and our varying queer identities. Opening our presentation with positionality statements allowed us to set the tone for a conversational presentation style that encouraged people in the room to voice their thoughts, experiences, and takeaways.
Moving further into our session, we presented a set of slides to discuss the origins and rationale of photovoice methodology, provide an overview of our study, share the definitions of various key constructs, and give our recommendations for decolonizing counseling research and practices with QWoC. Although the slides served as a guide for our presentation, the core of our session derived from attendees’ feedback, reflections, and observations. Attendees were given time to explore the exhibit and engage with the poster boards thoughtfully and intentionally. We then opened the floor for further reflections and observations connected to their experience engaging with the exhibit. Overall, attendees discussed their feelings, connections, and impressions of the photos that resonated with them. The debrief also included feedback on our process and approach to research, with many attendees expressing their excitement about decolonized research in action.
Our Positionality
Because of the nature of how our identities interact with our work, we decided to start our presentation with positionality statements to demonstrate our reflexive process. Having attended presentations at other conferences with introductions very focused on academic and professional achievements, we decided to stray from that structure in hopes of introducing ourselves in a way that felt more authentic, personal, and related to our work. Here are deeply personal positionality statements with which we center our experiences contextualized through our lineal histories and some of the identities that influence our work as researchers, clinicians, and educators.
Jessi Pham. I am a descendant of ancestors who continue to pass down rich cultural values and guidance accompanied by rituals, incense, and offerings. I dedicate my educational privileges to their sacrifices and perseverance. My experiences as a queer/bisexual, second-generation Chinese/Vietnamese cisgender man underscore my research approach.
Tiffany Perry-Wilson. I am a descendant of powerful and resilient peoples stolen from their lands consisting of wealth, melanated skin tones, and storytelling. Their sacrifice then and now is the foundation of my existence. My experiences as a QWoC within the African Diaspora roots and guides my comprehension and approach to research and clinical work.
Kevlyn Holmes. I am descended from people I do not know and because of this, I often feel unmoored. In my journey to connect to the parts of myself that have been lost to White supremacy culture, I’ve found I am making peace with and understanding words such as White, genderqueer, White woman, disabled, and demisexual. These parts and the desire to learn from the harm of my White ancestors drive my work. I strive to listen and honor every story I witness.
Grace Schroeder. I am the descendant of fierce and strong-headed advocates. I am also a mound of clay, shaped by the hands of my colleagues, co-researchers, and the various folx who share their stories and perspectives with me. My experiences as a White queer womxn underscore the need for me to serve as a platform in which I uplift BIPOC, providing context to how I approach my research and counseling theories.
Ana Reyes. I am a descendant of wise ones who, against all odds, survived and passed down their wisdom. My experiences as a queer, non-binary femme and a child of [un]documented immigrants of Afro-Latinx and Indigenous roots underscore my anti-oppressive and decolonial approach to research, counseling, and teaching.
Michelle Pollok. I am a descendant of strong womxn who walked against the grain, paving the path before me and instilling a sense of justice. As a White, cisgender researcher, I serve solely as a vessel for these unique stories of reclamation and healing.
In sharing these individualized positionality statements, we seek to honor the progression of our lineages and how they interact with the colonial and oppressive systems around us. These declarations are not just personal narratives but also critical reflections that guide our work. They illuminate the diverse perspectives and experiences that shape our collective approach, fostering a deeper understanding and commitment to anti-oppressive and decolonial methodologies. Through this practice, we aimed to co-create a space at the 2024 Bridging the Gap Symposium that acknowledged and respected the complexities of our identities, encouraging others to reflect on their own positionalities and the impact these have on their work and interactions.
The Healing Experiences and Responses of Our Attendees
Our attendees shared many insights with us, ranging from their connection with the material to the impact of our session. We are grateful that our intention behind various aspects of our presentation (i.e., introducing ourselves with our positionality statement and then leading with the exhibit) created an environment where attendees were willing to share their thoughts and critiques. One participant shared their hesitation toward attending our presentation on QWoC because the main presenters were White individuals who would be speaking about the experiences of QWoC; after hearing our introductions, they noted feeling more comfortable openly sharing their hesitation because of how we positioned ourselves in this work. This comment reified the importance of our critical reflexivity and our ongoing commitment to exploring how our identities impact our work. Another participant shared their connection to the first author, who introduced himself as a bisexual person—she revealed that, as someone who has experienced biphobia and bi-erasure, she felt seen and validated by the representation of the bisexual identity. Our introductions, one simple (yet powerful) portion of our presentation, impacted the flow of the presentation in a way that highlighted the importance of reflection and identity work in the realm of research, academia, and professional spaces. Coming into this symposium, we intended to build community and encourage collaboration, and by the end of our presentation, we felt very connected to the people in the room with us.
In discussing our presentation, we reflect with profound gratitude on the opportunity to present research we are passionate about with receptive and introspective attendees. Bearing witness to how attendees opened up and engaged with our presentation and research was incredibly rewarding for all of us. The way attendees embraced our decolonial approach and committed to engaging in vulnerable discussions underscored the importance of co-creating spaces where diverse voices are not only heard but celebrated. This experience reaffirmed that community is everything; it is the cornerstone of healing, growth, and social transformation. The interactions and connections formed left us feeling deeply nourished and inspired, reminding us of the transformative power of collective engagement and support.
We were reaffirmed that positioning ourselves authentically helps create a genuine connection with session attendees. The feedback we received highlighted the importance of showing up authentically and continually questioning how we show up in historically White spaces, reinforcing our commitment to decolonial work. Our experience is a testament to the critical role of introspection, camaraderie, and humility in the way we navigate academic, counseling, and healing spaces. There is significant power in showing up as we are and engaging in vulnerable conversations in academic settings such as presentations, knowing that someone in the audience will resonate with our authentic selves. These lessons will guide us in our ongoing journey to foster inclusive and transformative spaces.
Throughout this journey, we experienced a whirlwind of emotions—fright and excitement intertwined as we prepared and presented our work—yet the love and support we provided each other created a foundation of strength and dependability, allowing us to face our fears with courage. The process was filled with joy, gratitude, and excitement, moments of laughter and even tears, as we shared our feelings and experiences, allowing us to connect on a deep level. We were inspired by the courage to challenge existing systems, driven by our shared commitment to decolonial work and the belief that our authentic presence could inspire change. These feelings collectively enriched our experience and solidified our bond as a team. We hope that session attendees left feeling as enriched and nourished as we did and that, as a reader, you are inspired by this article to engage in critical reflection and decolonial practices.
Considerations for Counselor Educators and Researchers
Implementing decolonial practices in research can be challenging because of existing structures and systems that perpetuate colonized, oppressive, and racist ideologies. These norms have inevitably penetrated academia, clinical practice, and research methodologies, making the task daunting (Goodman et al., 2015). However, with commitment, intentionality, and a willingness to alter internalized theoretical and methodological frameworks, counselor educators (CEs) and researchers can integrate decolonial practices into their respective fields. Applying decolonial practices within academia and research involves significant challenges, necessitating unwavering dedication. This practice requires replacing previously used colonized methods, systems, and structures with decolonial ideologies and practices (Castañeda-Sound et al., 2024; Fish & Gone, 2024; Neville et al., 2024; Quinless, 2022; Tate et al., 2016).
Although this process involves de-centering the self and stepping away from traditional pedagogical approaches, CEs and researchers should build self-awareness through critical reflexivity. This lifelong commitment pairs well with the radical decolonization of oneself, academia, and research approaches. Critical reflexivity is a collaborative practice that involves internal work by CEs and participation from students and colleagues. For instance, Goodman et al. (2015) discussed that providing mentorship and supervision to incoming and current CEs assists in fostering a collaborative approach to critical reflexivity or critical consciousness. This could involve weekly and monthly required meetings to provide support and communal engagement in the self-reflective process. Collective commitment to decolonialize shifts from individualism to collectivism, prioritizing community, and holding each CE accountable within their critical reflexivity process.
Critical reflexivity is best done with an intentional approach. Purposeful selection of course materials, construction of syllabi, and application of research methodologies embedded with decolonized approaches, ideologies, and concepts exemplify intentionality (Castañeda-Sound et al., 2024; Fish & Gone, 2024; Goodman et al., 2015; Neville et al., 2024; Quinless, 2022; Tate et al., 2016). Intentional application of critical reflexivity was evident in our collaborative discussions while preparing for our presentation, where we practiced vulnerability by discussing our fears and worries and how our positionalities inevitably influence how we show up in academic spaces. Challenging inherently colonized frameworks requires commitment and intentionality in dismantling oppressive norms perpetuated in the counseling profession.
Counseling and counselor education programs are part of power structures and systems that contribute to continued inequities, oppression, and colonialism (Castañeda-Sound et al., 2024; Goodman et al., 2015; Shin, 2016). Goodman et al. (2015) emphasized the value of decolonizing traditional pedagogies within counselor education by applying tenets of liberation psychology, such as critical consciousness. They discussed how practices like the banking concept perpetuate colonialism in counselor education programs. This concept positions educators as the sole source of knowledge, depositing it into students, thus maintaining power imbalances and stifling independent thinking and questioning. Consequently, students are not empowered and are forced to rely on the professor, with their perspectives viewed as inadequate if they do not align with Westernized frameworks. The banking concept also applies to research settings, where researchers are seen as the sole providers of knowledge and considered experts on the lived experiences of the populations they study, which can be problematic (Goodman et al., 2015) and often supports the continued use of extractive research methodologies.
Cultivating a space of community and shared learning can nourish not only the students and co-researchers but also the CEs and researchers themselves. By approaching education and research with humility and openness to learning without assuming expertise, the likelihood of causing harm to the communities that we serve significantly diminishes.
Conclusion
Our photovoice exhibit and presentation at the 2024 NBCCF Bridging the Gap Symposium provided session attendees and us with a unique platform to share and reflect on the healing experiences of nine QWoC. By utilizing photovoice methodology in our research and grounding our approach in decolonial and liberatory principles, we were able to conduct and present research in a way that represented the diverse narratives of our co-researchers authentically.
Our work moves away from traditional deficit-based research that often reduces minoritized communities to the wounded subject position (Brown, 1995), thus diminishing queer people of color to their experiences of trauma and oppression. Instead, we focus on the strengths, resilience, and healing processes of QWoC. This shift is informed by intersectionality theory, decolonial scholarship, and participatory action research, inviting us to center the voices and experiences of our co-researchers in a meaningful, empathetic, and socially just manner.
Our presentation at the Bridging the Gap Symposium was not just a display of research findings but a call to action for counselors, researchers, and CEs alike to integrate decolonial practices into counseling and academia. Through an interactive gallery experience and open dialogue, we demonstrated how decolonial and liberatory research methodologies can foster empowerment and healing for all involved in the research process, including those who witness or read the findings. The feedback and reflections from attendees brought focus to the importance of co-creating spaces where diverse voices are heard, honored, and celebrated.
Implementing decolonial practices in research and counseling requires a commitment to self-examination, camaraderie, and humility. It involves challenging existing power structures and embracing authentic connections with the communities we interact with as counseling scholars and fellow human beings. As CEs and researchers, we must continually question how our identities and positionalities influence our work and strive to create inclusive, validating, and supportive environments for all. Our experience at the symposium reaffirmed the transformative power of community and collective engagement. The support and courage we found in each other allowed us to face our fears and present our work with pride.
In conclusion, this photovoice project and our subsequent presentation have not only enriched our understanding of healing experiences but also strengthened our resolve to continue engaging in decolonial and liberatory research. We hope that our work inspires others to embrace these methodologies, challenge oppressive systems, and support the healing and empowerment of minoritized communities.
Conflict of Interest and Funding Disclosure
The authors reported no conflict of interest
or funding contributions for the development
of this manuscript.
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Jessi Pham, BA, is a master’s student at California State University, Fullerton. Tiffany Perry-Wilson, MA, NCC, LPC, is a doctoral candidate at George Washington University and a licensed professional counselor at Psychological & Life Skills Associates. Kevlyn Holmes, BS, is a master’s student at California State University, Fullerton. Grace Schroeder, BA, is a master’s student at California State University, Fullerton. Ana Reyes, PhD, NCC, LPC, CHST, is a core faculty member at Antioch University. Michelle Pollok, BA, is a master’s student at California State University, Fullerton. Correspondence may be addressed to Jessi Pham, 800 N. State College Blvd EC-405, Fullerton, CA 92831, jessihp@csu.fullerton.edu.
Appendix
Recommendations for Self-Directed Learning
Counselor educators can familiarize themselves with liberatory, decolonial, participatory, and action-focused research methodologies that intentionally decentralize their role as researchers and encourage students to do the same. We suggest the following resources to support counselor educators on their journey:
Books
- Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy (1st ) by Ada Maria
Isasi-Dias and Eduardo Mendieta
- Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples by Linda Tuhiwai Smith
- Photovoice Research in Education and Beyond: A Practice Guide from Theory to Exhibition
by Amanda O. Latz
- Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods by Shawn Wilson
- Research as Resistance: Revisiting Critical, Indigenous, and Anti-oppressive Approaches
(2nd ed.) by Leslie Brown
Websites
Aug 24, 2023 | Volume 13 - Issue 2
Corrine R. Sackett, Heather L. Mack, Jyotsana Sharma, Ryan M. Cook, Jardin Dogan-Dixon
Microaggressions can and do occur in the counseling process, yet there is a dearth of literature about how counselors-in-training (CITs) experience this phenomenon from clients or how they may respond to clients who perpetuate microaggressions against them in a therapeutic setting. Therefore, in this constructivist phenomenological study, we explored CITs’ experiences of microaggressions from clients in the counseling process. Two interviews with six participants of various marginalized identities revealed the following themes: (a) internal reactions, (b) attempts to contextualize, (c) prevalence of microaggressions, (d) navigating microaggressions, and (e) seeking support. Findings and implications for CITs and counselor educators and supervisors are discussed.
Keywords: microaggressions, constructivist phenomenology, counseling process, counselors-in-training, counselor educators
Microaggressions have been defined as intentional or unintentional ongoing verbal or nonverbal offensives experienced by individuals of a marginalized group (Ratts et al., 2016) and as “subtle and stunning” daily racial offenses that impact the health and well-being of individuals (Pierce, 1970). Counselors and counselors-in-training (CITs) of marginalized identities are often uncertain of whether or how to respond to microaggressions in counseling sessions while keeping the counseling relationship intact (Branco & Bayne, 2020). As such, counseling researchers have the opportunity and responsibility to explore the experiences of counselors or CITs who are the target of microaggressions from clients. Scholarship around this topic can help the counseling profession, and counselor education specifically, in developing competencies to help guide CITs and counselors in these situations.
Given the reality that there are clients from privileged groups receiving counseling from CITs from marginalized groups (Haskins et al., 2015; Ratts et al., 2016) and that the counseling process is an intersection of cultural identities between the client and CIT (Ratts et al., 2016), there is potential for microaggressions to occur in this relationship. Various studies have explored microaggressions within the counseling setting as experienced by clients who identify as racial/ethnic minorities (Constantine, 2007; Crawford, 2011; Morton, 2011; Owen et al., 2011, 2014); however, much less is known about counselors’ and CITs’ experiences with clients who may perpetuate microaggressions against them (Branco & Bayne, 2020). Given the dearth of literature focusing on how CITs can and do handle microaggressions from clients, we aimed to help fill this gap in the literature by exploring CITs’ experiences of microaggressions from clients.
In the 1970s, Harvard-trained Black psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce coined the term “microaggression” to describe the insults that he witnessed Black Americans encounter daily (Pierce, 1970). His work has been seminal in laying a foundation for understanding the damage that negative interracial interactions have on Black Americans’ health. Decades later, Sue and colleagues (2007) continued Pierce’s research on microaggressions and expanded its definition to include experiences of cultural bias, prejudice, and power imbalance. Literature about microaggressions in the counseling profession highlights the negative impact of counselors being the offender, or the person who perpetuates microaggressions, toward a racially/ethnically marginalized client in session (Constantine, 2007; Owen et al., 2011).
Although racial microaggressions toward racially/ethnically marginalized people have been studied extensively, microaggressions can also target gender, sexual orientation, ability status, class, religion, and other visible and invisible identities (Chan et al., 2018). The consequences of microaggressions on the counselor–client relationship have been studied in the context of gender (Owen et al., 2010) and sexual orientation (Shelton & Delgado-Romero, 2013). As such, there is a need for more research to explore microaggressions as a phenomenon that affects various identities. When individuals identify with multiple salient identities, they are more likely to experience privilege and oppression. For instance, a person can experience White privilege while simultaneously experiencing marginalization from identifying as queer—this person can belong to both oppressive and oppressed groups. Because one identity can be stigmatized while another is privileged, there is complexity in understanding one’s whole identity rather than only its parts. The Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies (MSJCC) include a quadrant to represent a privileged client and a marginalized counselor (Ratts et al., 2016) that can be used to conceptualize the dynamic of microaggressions experienced by counselors from clients. It is possible, of course, for counselors and clients to identify with being in more than one quadrant simultaneously as members of both privileged and marginalized groups. Further, the intersectionality of race, gender, sexual orientation, and other identities may increase the frequency and impact of microaggressions (Williams et al., 2021). Microaggressions toward intersecting marginalized identities compound their harmful impact (Nadal et al., 2015).
Oppression on an individual level in the form of microaggressions, regardless of whether they are intentional or unintentional, can have a devastating impact on individuals’ physical and mental health (Pierce, 1970; Ratts et al., 2016). Depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress have been reported by researchers as being associated with microaggressions (Williams et al., 2021). Thus, it is feasible that CITs would experience these same mental and physical reactions to microaggressions within the counseling relationship (Branco & Bayne, 2020), which in turn seems likely to influence their work with current and future clients.
Purpose of the Study
Branco and Bayne (2020) asserted that counselor educators are called to provide training for counselors from marginalized identities to work with clients from privileged identities, and the counselor education field is lacking in this area. Because the cultural experiences and backgrounds of clients and counselors impact the counseling relationship (Constantine, 2007; Crawford, 2011; Morton, 2011; Owen et al., 2011, 2014), counseling process, treatment selection, and outcomes, it is critical that counseling researchers expand inquiry in this area (Hays, 2020). Specifically, counseling researchers need to inquire more about counselors’ experiences with social injustice and how those affect the counseling process. As established, the MSJCC framework allows for counselors and clients from many intersecting privileged and marginalized identities (Ratts et al., 2016). Although previous studies have focused exclusively on racial microaggressions from clients, Branco and Bayne (2020) called for a broader examination to include counselors or CITs who identify with a marginalized status outside of race and ethnicity. As such, the purpose of the current study was to explore CITs’ experiences of microaggressions from clients, regardless of the one or more marginalized identities they carried, through van Manen’s (2016) constructivist hermeneutic phenomenological approach. This is a reflective process focused on the lived experiences of participants. By specifically focusing on CITs’ experiences of microaggressions from clients, we gain insight into how to better provide supervision and training in this area. Thus, the research question that guided this investigation was: “What are CITs’ experiences of microaggressions from clients in the counseling process?”
Method
Research Design Overview
We chose van Manen’s (2016) constructivist hermeneutic phenomenological approach for this inquiry of CITs’ experiences of microaggressions from clients, as it aims to increase thoughtfulness, grasp essential meaning, and come into closer contact with the world while providing thought-provoking data that are ideal for clinical practice (Sackett & Cook, 2021). van Manen described hermeneutic phenomenological research as choosing a phenomenon of serious interest, investigating the lived experience of the phenomenon, reflecting on its essential themes, describing the phenomenon through writing and rewriting, remaining in pedagogical relationship, and balancing the parts of the whole of the research.
Researcher Reflexivity
Following van Manen’s (2016) advisement that researchers be aware of and transparent about their own experience of the phenomenon under investigation and the influence of their own values, beliefs, and experiences, we describe our positionality here for transparency. At the time of the study, authors Corrine R. Sackett, Jyotsana Sharma, and Ryan M. Cook were faculty members in counselor education programs at research universities—Sackett was an associate professor and Sharma and Cook were assistant professors. Heather L. Mack and Jardin Dogan-Dixon were graduates of a CACREP-accredited program specializing in clinical mental health counseling; Mack was practicing in agency and private practice settings and Dogan-Dixon was a correctional psychologist. Sackett, Mack, Sharma, and Dogan-Dixon identify as heterosexual and cisgender women, and Cook as a heterosexual and cisgender man. Sackett, Mack, and Cook identify as White, Sharma identifies as Asian Indian and international, and Dogan-Dixon identifies as Black and from a Christian background.
Sackett was drawn to this line of inquiry after a supervision session in which a supervisee disclosed a microaggression from a client related to gender. The supervisee’s site supervisor (a male counselor) was in the session as a co-counselor. Following the session, the CIT and site supervisor processed the event. Although the site supervisor was supportive, he advised the CIT not to address the microaggression with the client because it was not related to the client’s counseling goals. The CIT described feeling dismissed by her site supervisor’s response. She also described uncertainty in how to continue a meaningful counseling relationship with the client afterward without addressing the microaggression. This experience led Sackett to seek guidance from the literature on CITs’ or counselors’ handling of microaggressions from clients, but she found limited scholarly resources. Sackett was influenced by this experience in her conceptualization of the current study, and in analyzing and writing the findings. Further, while recognizing her privileged identities, Sackett has experienced gender microaggressions that have impacted her and the way she views this topic area. Mack, while also recognizing her privileged identities, has experienced gender microaggressions from clients and a site supervisor. Sharma identifies as an international scholar of Asian Indian descent. As an international woman of color, Sharma has experienced many microaggressions since moving to the United States. She has experienced microaggressions from clients, colleagues, and supervisors. Cook has wondered how supportive or unintentionally unsupportive he has been as a supervisor and faculty member with CITs’ experiences of microaggressions. Dogan-Dixon has experienced gendered racial microaggressions from clients, peers, and supervisors in various counseling settings across her training. She initially struggled to address microaggressions in the moment because of potential rejection and backlash; with practice, however, she has learned to address microaggressions in multiple ways, including caring confrontation. She now educates others on how to navigate microaggressions in personal and professional settings. In harnessing the interpretive nature of van Manen’s (2016) approach, instead of bracketing these biases, we embraced them as part of the process (Prosek & Gibson, 2021).
Participants
Participants included six CITs from CACREP-accredited counselor education programs in the United States. Sampling was purposive for the phenomenon under investigation (Prosek & Gibson, 2021), and all participants met the eligibility criteria of being enrolled in a CACREP-accredited master’s program with a specialty in clinical mental health or school counseling, being enrolled in or completed practicum or internship in their program, and having lived experience of microaggressions from clients in the counseling process. Constructivist qualitative studies tend to have smaller sample sizes that allow for more depth of understanding and intriguing findings (Boddy, 2016). Though we recruited from across the United States, our resulting sample consisted of participants from the Southern region of counselor education programs. Participant ages ranged from 26–30 years. Self-named gender identity included one female, two cisgender female, two cisgender male, and one participant who did not specify gender. Self-named sexual orientation included one straight, one lesbian, two bisexual, and two who did not specify. Participants self-identified their racial/ethnic identities as Hispanic (one), Hispanic/Latina (one), Black/Afro Latino (one), Caucasian (one), and White (two). Those who answered the question of other relevant identities named student or partnership status. Participants were entered into a drawing for one of three $15 Starbucks gift cards after completion of the second interview as a token of appreciation for their time.
Participant Recruitment
Sackett obtained human subjects research approval from her university of employment’s IRB. Sackett then recruited participants by sending two rounds of emails explaining the purpose of the study to contacts from 387 CACREP-accredited master’s programs in the United States with specialty areas in clinical mental health and school counseling. The email requested the faculty member send the recruitment email with the purpose of the study and a note about what participation entailed to their master’s students who were currently enrolled in, or had completed, practicum or internship in their program. Inclusion criteria included the experience of a microaggression from a client, regardless of marginalized identity(ies) of the CIT. The email asked CITs to contact Sackett if interested in participation. When participants contacted Sackett, she completed the informed consent process and referred them to Mack to schedule the first interview. Ten individuals contacted Sackett with interest in participating in the study. However, four of the initial 10 individuals reported not having experiences of microaggressions to share after hearing the definition of a microaggression from Mack (see Data Collection below).
Data Collection
Mack conducted two interviews over Zoom with each participant. Two interviews per participant allowed for sustained engagement with the phenomenon, and interviews were spaced from 1 to 3 weeks apart per participant to allow time for reflection between the interviews. This resulted in 12 interviews. Each participant answered demographic questions during the first interview that requested gender, age, race/ethnicity, any other relevant identities, and pseudonym. To begin each interview, Mack broached her identities with participants (Day-Vines et al., 2007) and verbally gave participants a definition of microaggressions as intentional or unintentional ongoing verbal or nonverbal offensives experienced by individuals of a marginalized group (Ratts et al., 2016). Interview questions were centered on CITs’ experiences of microaggressions from clients, in line with van Manen’s (2016) recommendation that the interview be strongly oriented to the phenomenon. Interview questions were developed by Sackett, Mack, and Sharma and were informed by extant literature of counselors’ experiences of microaggressions from clients (e.g., Branco & Bayne, 2020), multicultural counseling competencies (e.g., Ratts et al., 2016), and CITs’ prioritization of information for supervision (e.g., Cook & Welfare, 2018), coupled with the authors’ respective expertise and perspectives. Researchers used the same interview protocol for both interviews, which can be found in the Appendix. While being mindful of the differences between counseling and interviewing (Sackett & Lawson, 2016), Mack utilized counseling skills to facilitate discussion and to communicate empathy (Kleist, 2017). Interviews ranged in length from 24 to 62 minutes (M = 46.1; SD = 11.82), except for Lila’s second interview of only approximately 5 minutes, as she indicated she had nothing to add from the previous interview. Interviews were audio-recorded and later transcribed by a graduate assistant.
Analysis
We used NVivo Version 12 (QSR, 2018) software to manage the data. Operating from van Manen’s (2016) approach, we were concerned with capturing the essential meaning of the phenomenon, which involved seeing the essential meaning of each participant’s experience, reaching a reflective determination, and explaining the experience. In this process, we gave order to the research and writing by considering the phenomenon in themes. Along with van Manen’s hermeneutic phenomenological approach, we employed the First and Second Cycle coding process described by Miles et al. (2020). After listening to all participant interviews, Sackett reviewed the 12 interview transcripts while utilizing a line-by-line approach to coding (van Manen, 2016). She applied in vivo codes in her first review and then went back through the data to apply a combination of descriptive codes, process codes, emotion codes, and value codes in the First Cycle coding (Miles et al., 2020). This allowed for a way to summarize segments of data. Next, Sackett applied Second Cycle coding, or pattern coding, to group the initial codes into themes. van Manen described this theme development as giving shape to the shapeless in the data.
We followed van Manen’s (2016) recommendation that for deeper understanding, a peer may read a draft of the description of the phenomenon and share their insights of whether the description resonates with their own experience of the participants’ descriptions. As such, Mack, who had conducted the interviews, and Sharma, who listened to the recordings of the interviews, read the steps of First and Second Cycle coding Sackett employed and shared their insights of how the description of the findings reflected their experience of the participants’ accounts. Through this iterative process, we were able to examine, reinterpret, and reformulate themes while keeping in mind van Manen’s guiding question for this process of whether the phenomenon would still be the same if we were to change or delete any theme. We followed van Manen’s advisement to be mindful to capture individual experiential differences in our data analysis and writing process of the phenomenon. In this study, that meant considering the unique identities of each participant, including intersecting identities and how those may impact their experience of microaggressions from clients. We chose to structure our writing of the phenomenon thematically, one of van Manen’s suggestions for organizing the portrayal of the data. There is some overlap in the nuances of the meanings of the themes, as describing a phenomenon is bound to have a somewhat forced quality.
Methodological Integrity
As suggested by van Manen (2016), the researchers engaged with each other throughout the entire process of data collection and analysis in a collaborative way that led to deeper understanding of the phenomenon. This process strengthened our engagement with the phenomenon and transcended the limits of having a sole researcher. In doing this, we had regular phone calls, video meetings, and emails throughout the study. Sackett kept a reflective journal while listening to the interviews and conducting analysis. Further, we kept a log of each step in the process, including interview data, codes, and theme development, to show the culmination of our interpretation of the findings. Finally, we conducted two member checks through email with each participant. Member checks allowed participants to reflect on the transcripts of the interviews for further insight and to review the themes and allow for feedback on if it was an accurate description of what the experience is like (van Manen, 2016). Therefore, we conducted member checks after interviews were transcribed and after theme development. In the second member check, we invited participants into dialogue around whether the themes reflected their experience of the phenomenon.
Findings
Five themes emerged from our exploration of CITs’ experiences of microaggressions from clients in the counseling process: (a) internal reactions, (b) attempts to contextualize, (c) prevalence of microaggressions, (d) navigating microaggressions, and (e) seeking support. The first theme, internal reactions, had three subthemes: caught off guard, discomfort, and imposter phenomenon. The fourth theme, navigating microaggressions, had five subthemes: fear of responding genuinely, letting it go, attempting to redirect, directly responding, and avoiding. The final theme, seeking support, had three subthemes: site, university, and family and peers. Pseudonyms chosen by the participants are used throughout the Findings section to maintain participants’ confidentiality.
Internal Reactions
The first theme, internal reactions, embodies what was happening internally with CITs as they experienced microaggressions in the counseling process. This theme includes subthemes centered around being caught off guard, feeling discomfort, and experiencing imposter phenomenon.
Caught Off Guard
The first subtheme of internal reactions CITs experienced, caught off guard, describes the initial reaction from the microaggression and not being sure how to react outwardly. David cautiously described his reaction to a parent in a school counseling setting as “mostly just confusion and not really being sure how to respond in that particular situation to what the parent had said.” Wesley, on the other hand, also in a school counseling setting, carefully described trying to manage being caught off guard with how he responded nonverbally in the moment:
I put on my poker face. Nonverbally, eyes kind of narrow, brows furrow. . . . [if] they catch me off guard, like one eyebrow goes up. But because . . . of the mask [from the pandemic], they can’t really read my facial expression, they can only see my eyes.
Discomfort
CITs also conveyed feeling discomfort in their internal reactions to microaggressions, including anxiety, fear, hurt, sadness, and anger. Lila solemnly described her surprise and discomfort with a client making assumptions of her based on ethnicity as “not ashamed, but saddened that she made that difference between us. I didn’t think she would have done that.”
Imposter Phenomenon
The third subtheme that resonated with CITs’ experiences in terms of internal reactions was imposter phenomenon. CITs often felt microaggressions from clients made them question their competency and even confirmed doubts they already had in the counselor role, as David thoughtfully articulated:
I think this goes back a little bit to the imposter syndrome that a lot of interns feel, and that I know that I’ve certainly felt. It’s like someone seeing me for who I am and confirming all the different feelings that I have about myself. About maybe not being fully capable in the role yet. . . . very much like, “oh you’re seeing me for who I am” and feeling . . . “I agree with you. You’re seeing how I see myself in some situations.”
Attempts to Contextualize
The next theme, attempts to contextualize, captures CITs’ tendency and desire to try to make sense of the client microaggression and to understand where the client was coming from and why they may have felt that way or may have said those things. For instance, Lila rationalized—while not excusing the microaggression from her client—“I guess the moment when she said that she was ill, and she was going through a lot of issues. So, I kind of understand her, but I don’t think there was a need of saying stuff like that.” Riley came from the perspective that it is part of a counselor’s role to seek to understand the microaggression:
I see where individuals come from and . . . my job will be to understand the perspective of the other individual . . . and show that type of unconditional positive regard and that unconditional empathy toward them. And kind of look at things from their view. I try not to take things . . . too hard. Because it was just the way they were raised.
Prevalence of Microaggressions
The next theme encompasses CITs’ perspectives that microaggressions are part of their lives and ongoing experiences, and in some cases they described feeling a bit numb or resigned to microaggressions. Riley said that she “didn’t feel anything. I was just like, ‘here this guy goes again.’ I wasn’t frustrated because I didn’t feel my face getting hot. . . . Typically when I get frustrated, my ears start to burn.”
Wesley underscored the prevalence of these experiences in his world, too: “At this point, nothing really surprises me. Maybe it’s me putting on a pair of rose-colored glasses and just using the glass to filter through whatever microaggressions come at me at this point.” He expressed feeling like he had experienced enough microaggressions to “kind of become numb to it. . . . it happens, and you don’t even pay it any mind, especially living in the South.”
Navigating Microaggressions
The next theme speaks to how CITs navigated, or thought about navigating, the microaggressions with clients. These responses ranged broadly from fear of responding genuinely to letting it go, attempting to redirect, directly responding, or avoiding.
Fear of Responding Genuinely
The first subtheme captures the participants’ fear of responding genuinely to clients, even when in some cases they would have liked to. Some of this fear centered on participants’ awareness that they may be playing into stereotypes held by clients if they were to respond genuinely, as Riley richly articulated:
That really bothers me . . . I tend to find myself taking a moment to myself, and I’ll be like, “okay, you’re good” . . . “that’s okay. It’s just one thing that one person told you and maybe they were having a bad day.” So, I try to be as understanding as I can.
Riley expressed that society and the media often portray Latina women as “feisty” or “spicy,” and that she does not want to “give [someone] that satisfaction” of confirming the stereotype: “I’m not like that, you know? I’m not spicy. I’m not a food.”
Other CITs described fear of the vulnerability involved with responding genuinely to a client’s microaggression. For example, Blake explained her genuine response and surrounding fear:
And I did disclose to the client that I’m bisexual. I said, “Oh I’m, I’m bi.” But I had that like, even knowing that the client was part of LGBTQ community, I had that question of like, “Why is the client asking? Is this appropriate? What should I say? What do I do?”
Letting It Go
CITs described often letting microaggressions go for the sake of the client, the counseling, and the counseling relationship. Connecting back to the theme of attempting to contextualize the microaggression, Riley felt it was her responsibility to let it go, “because they’re [microaggressions] from clients, I understand the role as . . . as a student counselor, that I have to kind of push it aside, and bracket those feelings.” Wesley was earnest in his feeling that microaggressions from students’ parents should not get in the way of his work as a school CIT:
Yeah it’s going to take the focus off of the kid. And it’s going to make things awkward. So I’m all for teaching people, but there’s a . . . moment in time when it’s appropriate. And at this point . . . I’m just trying to get through what we’re doing so we can move on to the next parent. No . . . hard feelings, I’m not upset. I’m a little disappointed, but I’m not livid . . . let’s just move on.
Attempting to Redirect
Some CITs chose to navigate the microaggression by redirecting it back to the client or to another topic without directly addressing the microaggression. For instance, Riley spoke to her efforts to connect these incidents back to clients indirectly: “Even if it’s something said toward us, we try to find a window . . . or different backdoor type of thing to redirect whatever they are saying back to them.”
Directly Responding
There were times in the CITs’ experiences of microaggressions in counseling where there was a direct response, either by themselves, a part of the client system, or their site supervisors. CITs seemed to view these instances as reparative in the rift the microaggression created in the therapeutic relationship. For example, Wesley fondly recalled a time when a student apologized for his parent’s microaggression after the fact:
They felt that I was uncomfortable, and they felt the need to try and repair it by apologizing for their parents. So it was very validating to me as a person. And to me as a Black person, because the kid realize what their parents had [done] was out of pocket . . . I’m assuming the kid didn’t want our relationship to suffer. . . . So we talked about it. “Look it’s cool it happened, you and I are still good,” and we moved on.
In a different vein, Blake said that responding directly to a youth client questioning her sexual identity in a public area of the practice helped build trust with the client:
[If] I had hesitated, or if I had said, “oh, no, like I’m not like [that],” I think you know, I think people are perceptive and I think that would have damaged [the relationship]. Even if I’m not sure that the disclosure was an additive piece to the relationship, I think that not being forthcoming would have detracted from anything in that moment.
Avoiding
Finally, within the theme of navigating clients’ microaggressions, participants reported engaging in avoidance afterward in response. This avoidance included instances when the CIT dreaded contact with the client (or the client system) and limited contact when possible. Avoidance also showed up on behalf of the client by discontinuing work with the CIT in individual or group settings. M relayed that her site found a way to separate her and the client who microaggressed against her: “They even said . . . ‘We’re going to not put her in groups with you . . . it’s just not safe for either of you guys.’” Wesley, a school counseling CIT, somberly described parents trying to avoid him after microaggressing against him: “I’ve had a few [parents] request a different . . . counselor when they come in, because they may feel like they soured their relationship with me already. These are the parents . . . who have noticed that they . . . micro-assaulted me.”
Seeking Support
The final theme, seeking support, captures participants’ experiences (or lack thereof) of seeking and finding support from their sites, university supervisors and faculty, and family and peers.
Site
CITs often found support at their sites after experiencing microaggressions from clients. This was frequently seemingly because of physical proximity. Often CITs’ site supervisors or other counselors at the site may have witnessed the microaggression or CITs were able to debrief with someone nearby after it happened. David indicated having a quick but meaningful moment of support with his site supervisor before moving on to their next meeting. He recalled that “after the meeting my supervisor and I just kind of like gave each other a look like, ‘ooh that was kind of a strange meeting.’” M was able to debrief with her site supervisor regularly following repeated microaggressions from her client and found her guidance helpful and supportive, especially in the realm of not taking things personally. M said her supervisor encouraged her to “process it on my own, to make sure that it’s not affecting me . . . to where I can’t even use my counseling skills. Like she didn’t want me to go home at night thinking that a patient hates me.”
University
For the most part, CITs described either not taking these instances of microaggressions to university supervisors or faculty or facing unsupportive responses when they did. Blake relayed feeling shut down by a faculty member’s humor in a class discussion when she brought up how she handled a microaggression with self-disclosure:
Yeah it was a moment of . . . playful questioning of like, “Oh, that’s the decision you made?” That kind of has that implication that maybe it wasn’t the best decision without having more context, right? And I know . . . that [humor is] kind of his approach. But it was a moment, where I was . . . like, “well I don’t really feel like going further with this.”
In some cases, CITs did find helpful and supportive responses from their faculty. Riley described her professor normalizing her experience and giving her what she found to be helpful advice:
[He] told me, “Sometimes we get things like that,” and that’s when he gave me that advice of trying to redirect the question or redirect it back to the client, versus falling into the trap. Well, he called it a trap. Into that little trap they could be setting for us.
Many participants described feeling as though the microaggression was handled by themselves, at their sites, or through processing with family; thus, they felt no need to bring it up in university supervision.
Family and Peers
CITs frequently described seeking out their families, friends, and peers for support after experiencing a microaggression from a client. Lila processed her experience with her husband, who gave her advice to have more boundaries with her client and “to keep it more professional. . . . I would sometimes disclose about my personal life because she would ask. So I just stopped disclosing.” Riley expressed feeling the need to vent to friends about her experience, “like ‘What the hell was this lady thinking like telling me that?’ . . . just letting it out.”
Wesley sought support from his mother and grandmother in processing microaggressions perpetuated by students’ parents in his school counseling role. He relayed their supportive response:
It was more of a, “These things can happen, you handle it appropriately.” . . . they have had experiences with microaggressions themselves. [They] may not have known what to call them but have experienced it. And pretty much just applauded me for staying neutral, not punishing the kid for what their parents said, and not completely blasting the parent in the meeting because . . . of a joke they let out.
Discussion
In the current study, we explored six CITs’ experiences of microaggressions perpetuated by their clients in counseling settings. The findings from this study provide insight into how novice counselors experience microaggressions from their clients and choose to handle it. We hope these findings enrich the understanding of client-based microaggressions and offer important implications for CITs, counselor educators, and supervisors.
The first theme, internal reactions, reflected the ways in which participants internally processed the microaggression from their client, which is consistent with prior literature of counselors of color’s experiences with microaggressions from clients (Branco & Bayne, 2020). Interestingly, the CITs in the current study described being caught off guard—feeling confused and uncertain with how to respond—while the more seasoned counselors of color in Branco and Bayne’s (2020) study described buffering and bracing for the microaggression, as if they were prepared for it. Counselors in Branco and Bayne’s study (2020) described their readiness for microaggressions from clients was informed by their prior and extensive personal and professional experiences. Although the CITs may have experienced microaggressions in their personal lives and were used to them, as evidenced by the theme of prevalence of microaggressions, their being caught off guard may be attributable to their lack of counseling experience, and more specifically, having never experienced microaggressions from clients and having not yet learned how to navigate this issue.
The CITs further described how microaggressions from clients caused feelings of hurt, fear, anger, sadness (subtheme of discomfort), and experiences of imposter phenomenon. CITs commonly experience confusion, doubt, and worry about their own professional competencies and preparedness as counselors—sometimes internalizing issues in counseling as their own failures (Loganbill et al., 1982; McNeil & Stoltenberg, 2016). Ultimately, CITs in this study also tried to understand the microaggression from their clients’ perspectives. CITs seemed to understand that people inherit their biases from their families and ancestors and reinforce them through microaggressions, oftentimes unintentionally (Williams et al., 2021). Counselors of color in Branco and Bayne’s (2020) study expressed that they tried to make sense of the microaggression as well, and considered their clients’ worldview, racial identity development, and experiences as they evaluated how they would handle the microaggression. The degree to which CITs can consider the clients’ worldview and cultural identity development may depend on their level of professional development (McNeil & Stoltenberg, 2016) and their own identity development (Day-Vines et al., 2007; Jones et al., 2019).
The CITs in the current study described microaggressions as an ongoing part of their lives, as captured in the theme of prevalence of microaggressions. Microaggressions have been referred to as everyday racism, as they are routine and chronic for individuals of racially and ethnically marginalized populations (Williams et al., 2021). This finding is consistent with prior literature of racial microaggressions (Branco & Bayne, 2020; Haskins et al., 2015, Pierce, 1970). Our findings also extend the knowledge base about microaggressions from clients, as microaggressions can target not only race and ethnicity, but also gender, sexual orientation, age, socioeconomic class, and religion. This finding is not unexpected; as informed by the MSJCC (Ratts et al., 2016), counselors and clients possess multiple identities, both privileged and marginalized, and visible and invisible.
The CITs in this study employed a variety of strategies in navigating microaggressions from their clients. Many CITs felt discomfort in the moment, but they were fearful of responding with their genuine reactions for various reasons. Some CITs tried to redirect the microaggressive client by concentrating on the client’s presenting issue or by taking the focus of the conversation elsewhere. Some CITs directly addressed perpetrators’ microaggressions and expressed that this action helped the relationship, while others decided to forgo addressing the microaggressions altogether. In some situations, clients and CITs attempted to avoid each other following the microaggressive incident. These varying responses are not unlike those found in prior research (Branco & Bayne, 2020). A unique contribution to this study is that our participants even experienced microaggressions from clients’ parents, reflecting a larger system that may foster and perpetuate biased opinions and perspectives toward individuals with marginalized identities. When counseling children, parents play an important role in the counseling relationship, despite not being the identified client (Sackett & Cook, 2021).
The final theme, seeking support, reflected the participants’ willingness and desire to seek support for their experiences of microaggression and from whom the support was sought. CITs must decide whether to disclose an issue experienced in counseling, including microaggressions (Branco & Bayne, 2020), and with whom they trust to share this information (Cook & Welfare, 2018; Cook et al., 2019). Some counselors in Branco and Bayne’s (2020) study spoke of seeking support (i.e., coworker, friend), while others did not and chose to process the event independently. The response of the CITs in our study was also somewhat mixed in this regard, as some CITs sought guidance from professionals at their site or, less often, from university faculty or supervisors, while others sought support from individuals in their personal lives. Given that our participants were trainees, it is not unexpected that they would seek guidance from someone more experienced, like a supervisor (McNeil & Stoltenberg, 2016), though interestingly many CITs did not choose to bring these situations to a university supervisor or faculty member. Further, the participants’ satisfaction with the support that they received, especially from their university, varied greatly. Although some participants felt validated, others felt unsupported. It remains to be seen how the response of the supervisors might inform participants’ actions in the future, although Cook et al. (2019) found that CITs who disclosed a salient concern to their supervisors and felt unsupported may be less willing or unwilling to bring up similar issues in the future with the same supervisor.
The finding that CITs in this study were discussing the microaggressions with family and peers must be carefully considered, even though this finding is not entirely unexpected. Ladany et al. (1996) found that CITs commonly discussed issues withheld from their supervisors with peers and friends, although these people were most often also in the mental health field. Further, studies have found that counselors with marginalized identities value the support of others with shared identities (Branco & Bayne, 2020; Haskins et al., 2015). However, like other scholars (Ladany et al., 1996), we wonder how a CIT’s professional development or client’s care might be impacted by heeding the advice of or seeking support from someone who does not possess the necessary training or is bound to the same ethical and professional mandates as a clinical supervisor or infield peer.
Limitations
There are limitations to this study that are important to note. Although researchers recruited participants from CACREP-accredited programs from across the United States, the resulting sample consisted of only those from the Southern region. CITs’ experiences with microaggressions in this region may be different from those in other parts of the country. Next, we did not explicitly ask about participants’ targeted identities; this information was inferred from participants’ experiences. Although a plethora of existing research focuses on racial microaggressions, we acknowledge that our participants also spoke about other marginalized identities that were salient to them. Additionally, although our sample size was congruent with the constructivist philosophical stance and scope of the study (Boddy, 2016), the sample was relatively small. Counselor educators should consider the transferability to CITs with marginalized identities working with clients of privileged identities. Finally, given van Manen’s (2016) recommendation for an interpretive conversation with participants around the identified themes, scheduling a verbal conversation with each participant for the second member check may have allowed for more input from participants on the findings.
Implications for CITs, Counselor Educators, and Supervisors
Readers will need to determine, along with the researchers’ description, the naturalistic generalizability of these study findings to their contexts (Hays & McKibben, 2021). However, the findings from this study offer several notable implications for CITs. As with the participants in this study, CITs experiencing uncertainty with how to respond to microaggressions from clients should be expected, given that microaggressions can be difficult to identify and rectify because of their nebulous nature (Williams et al., 2021) and given the lack of training CITs receive on how to navigate these complex issues (Haskins et al., 2015). Further, learning how to best attend to cultural issues in the counseling relationship is a learned skill (Ratts et al., 2016) that is gained through curiosity, intentional learning, lived experience, and continued professional development (McNeil & Stoltenberg, 2016). As evidenced by findings from this study, as well as other studies (e.g., Branco & Bayne, 2020), counselors choose to respond to microaggressions from their clients in a multitude of ways, including offering no response at all. How best to respond to microaggressions is ultimately the choice of the CITs themselves, including the degree to which they discuss their experience and with whom. For example, CITs must consider their position of power in the counselor role, the impact of any decision on the counseling relationship, the intentionality of clients’ microaggressions, and their own emotional well-being
(Pierce, 1970). Given the complexity of this decision, there may be some useful strategies to help inform CITs’ decisions in how to best respond (Hernández et al., 2010; Nadal, 2011).
CITs may find it helpful to broach cultural identities with their clients at the beginning of their working relationship (Day-Vines et al., 2007). By inviting and normalizing conversations of cultural differences, it may make it easier for both parties to openly discuss microaggressions when they occur. CITs may also find it helpful to model humility in the counseling relationship by correcting their own assumptions about clients (Marbley, 2004). Broaching is a skill and a form of immediacy, or processing the here and now of the counseling relationship, which has been found meaningful in the counseling relationship and the counseling process to clients (Sackett & Lawson, 2016; Sackett et al., 2012) and CITs (Sackett et al., 2012). We believe CITs can harness the skill of immediacy (i.e., broaching) to address microaggressions with clients when they occur in counseling. But first, they need to be taught skills to disarm and dismantle microaggressions to reduce the harm and distress they may cause (Sue et al., 2019). Although the onus is not on CITs who experience microaggressions to always address them in the moment, developing a clinical skillset to educate clients on how to recognize their biases, challenge erroneous beliefs that undergird microaggressions, and develop empathy with those they have harmed is important to mitigating the risk of burnout among CITs with marginalized identities (Williams, 2020).
The findings from this study also offer important implications for counselor educators and supervisors. Fickling et al. (2019) contended that the MSJCC framework (Ratts et al., 2016) should be explicitly integrated into clinical supervision. These findings might also provide a rationale for counselor educators to consider how to infuse the MSJCC framework into their classrooms to better prepare students for microaggressions from clients. Specifically, counselor educators and supervisors can examine with CITs how a counselor holding a marginalized identity can engage with a client holding a privileged identity in a counseling relationship, including discussing or role-playing various scenarios and ways to manage microaggressions from clients (Branco & Bayne, 2020). Encouraging counselor self-care strategies (Sue et al., 2019) in processing these scenarios is critical.
Haskins and colleagues (2015) found that counselor educators acknowledged their curriculum was tailored for White students to work with White clients, even if unintentionally. Counselor education program faculty may apply critical race theory tenets to their curriculum to challenge the dominant White discourse in counselor education, as advised by Haskins and Singh (2015). Our findings highlight the value of training related to CITs’ other marginalized identities as well (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, religion, first language) when working with clients of various privileged and/or visible identities, a need identified by Branco and Bayne (2020). The absence of education on navigating microaggressions may lay the foundation for marginalized students to feel as though their experiences are misunderstood or unwelcomed by faculty or supervisors. The current study provides counselor educators and supervisors with information from CITs on how they experience the counseling process when the dynamics of clients with privileged identities and counselors with marginalized identities are present and political (Ratts et al., 2016). Our study findings fill a gap in the literature of the experiences of CITs who encounter clients who offend and perpetuate microaggressions against them while in session.
Because CITs and supervisees control what they share in supervision, fostering an environment that promotes supervisee disclosure is critical (Cook & Welfare, 2018). Studies of intentional nondisclosure (i.e., supervisees’ purposeful withholding of salient information in supervision; Cook & Welfare, 2018; Ladany et al., 1996) found that supervisors can best mitigate supervisees withholding information by attending to the supervisory relationship and demonstrating cultural humility (Cook & Welfare, 2018; Cook et al., 2020). When a CIT voices concerns related to their identities (i.e., a microaggression), counselor educators and supervisors have an opportunity to support such disclosure in a way that validates the CIT’s experience and encourages future disclosures (Cook et al., 2019). Jones et al. (2019) provided situational examples and related response prompts to guide counselor educators and supervisors on ways to broach cultural differences with their supervisees at the beginning of the supervisory relationship and appropriately attend to cultural issues throughout the relationship. Further, as multicultural competence is positively correlated to a stronger supervisory relationship from the supervisees’ perspective (Fickling et al., 2019), supervisors who work to incorporate the MSJCC framework into their supervision will benefit in their supervisory relationships, hopefully leading to increased disclosure of experienced microaggressions, and provision of appropriate support in navigating the CIT–client relationship.
Conflict of Interest and Funding Disclosure
The authors reported no conflict of interest
or funding contributions for the development
of this manuscript.
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Appendix
Interview Protocol
Tell me about your experience(s) where a client said something that felt like a microaggression toward you.
- What feelings came to you when you experienced the microaggression from your client?
- What thoughts came to you?
- How did you respond (verbally and/or nonverbally)?
- How did the client respond to your response?
- What occurred then?
- How do you feel this impacted your relationship with the client?
Did you process this experience with anyone? With whom did you share about this experience (peers, supervisors, faculty, friends, family, etc.)?
If you processed this with your supervisor(s), was this a doctoral student supervisor, faculty supervisor, or site supervisor?
- How did your supervisor(s) respond?
- How did your supervisor(s) encourage you to respond?
- How did you feel about that response from your supervisor(s)?
- How did you proceed after the feedback from your supervisor(s)?
If any further action was taken with your client following supervision:
- How did your client respond?
- How do you feel about how it went?
- How do you feel this impacted your relationship with the client?
Did you seek [additional] supervision following [remedial] interactions you may have had with your client?
- From whom?
- What was the feedback from your supervisor(s)?
How do you feel this entire experience impacted your relationship with your supervisor(s)?
Any other experiences?
Corrine R. Sackett, PhD, LMFT, is an associate professor at Clemson University. Heather L. Mack, LPC, works for The Well Center in South Carolina. Jyotsana Sharma, PhD, ACS, LCMHC(NH), is an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University. Ryan M. Cook, PhD, LPC, ACS, is an associate professor at the University of Alabama. Jardin Dogan-Dixon, PhD, is a Correctional Psychologist for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Correspondence may be addressed to Corrine R. Sackett, 225 S. Pleasantburg Dr., Suite D-1, Greenville, SC 29607, csacket@clemson.edu.
Aug 10, 2022 | Volume 12 - Issue 2
Gregory T. Hatchett
This study involved a longitudinal analysis of the journal article publications accrued by counselor educators at comprehensive universities over the first 20 years since receiving their doctoral degrees. A review of electronic databases revealed these counselor educators accrued a median of three journal article publications over the first 20 years since degree completion. Faculty rank, inferred binary gender, and the date of terminal degree all predicted cumulative journal article publication counts. An analysis of sequence charts revealed that journal article publication counts are not invariant over the first 20 years since degree completion, but vary based on time, faculty rank, and inferred binary gender. The implications of this research for counselor education training are discussed.
Keywords: counselor educators, journal article publications, faculty rank, comprehensive universities, gender
The primary purpose of doctoral-level training in counselor education is to prepare program graduates for careers as counselor educators and clinical supervisors (Snow & Field, 2020). Consistent with this objective, graduates of counselor education and supervision programs accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) are required to attain numerous research competencies that will equip them for making scholarly contributions to the counseling literature (CACREP, 2015). Likewise, the PhD degree, which is the terminal degree offered to graduates of nearly all these programs, has been traditionally designed to prepare graduates for research and teaching in higher education (e.g., Dill & Morrison, 1985).
Be that as it may, most graduates of counselor education and supervision programs do not become faculty members, let alone faculty at research-intensive universities (e.g., Lawrence & Hatchett, 2022; Schweiger et al., 2012; Zimpfer, 1996). For example, Lawrence and Hatchett (2022) recently investigated the occupational outcomes of 314 graduates of CACREP-accredited doctoral programs. Overall, they found that 41.4% of these graduates had some type of faculty position in higher education. However, faculty positions as assistant professors in CACREP-accredited programs were much less common (23.9% of the total sample), and assistant professor positions in CACREP-accredited counseling programs at universities classified by the Carnegie Classification System (https://carnegieclassifications.acenet.edu) as either R1 (Very high research activity) or R2 (High research activity) were relatively rare (8.3% of the total sample). Thus, fewer than 1 in 10 of these recent program graduates attained professor positions at universities that expect high levels of scholarly productivity.
At the time of this writing, 401 colleges and universities in the United States and Puerto Rico have at least one CACREP-accredited counseling program. However, only 134 (33.5%) of these institutions have a Carnegie Classification of either an R1 or R2. More common are CACREP-accredited programs at master’s degree–granting institutions designated by the Carnegie system as M1 (Larger programs), M2 (Medium programs), or M3 (Smaller programs). Many of these universities would fall under the general umbrella of what are commonly denoted as comprehensive universities. At comprehensive universities, the focus is typically on undergraduate education, and graduate education tends to be limited to master’s degrees in professional disciplines, such as education and business (Youn & Price, 2009). Compared to their colleagues at research-intensive universities, faculty at comprehensive universities tend to have high teaching loads and greater expectations for service along with substantially lower expectations for faculty scholarly productivity (Hatchett, 2021; Henderson, 2011).
Though the scholarship expectations are lower, counselor educators at comprehensive universities are still commonly expected to exhibit some level of scholarly productivity for performance evaluations as well as tenure and promotion decisions (Fairweather, 2005; Hatchett, 2020; Youn & Price, 2009). Specific to counselor education, Hatchett (2020) recently surveyed 168 counselor educators about their perceptions of the tenure process, workloads, and their annual scholarly productivity. Regarding journal article publications, these counselor educators reported accruing a median of 0.45 national or international journal article publications a year. However, there is reason to believe that this sample statistic may be an overestimate. For one, only about 20% of the counselor educators at comprehensive universities completed the survey. Secondly, the rate of journal article publications reported by this sample of counselor educators greatly exceeds estimates attained from archival research.
For example, Hatchett et al. (2020) assessed the journal article publications of a large sample (N = 821) of counselor educators employed in CACREP-accredited master’s-level counseling programs housed in comprehensive universities. To identify peer-reviewed journal articles, they searched these counselor educators’ names through three electronic databases (i.e., PsycINFO, ERIC, Academic Search Complete) for the time interval of January 1, 2008, through December 31, 2017. They found that these counselor educators had attained a median of only 1 (M = 1.99, SD = 3.46) peer-reviewed publication over this
10-year time interval; notably, nearly half of this sample (n = 381, 46.4%) did not have any journal article publications indexed in any of the three databases. Granted, these three electronic databases do not capture all the journal article publications attained by counselor educators. Nonetheless, the gap between self-report (Hatchett, 2020) and archival publication estimates (Hatchett et al., 2020) is so large that it probably cannot be explained away by publications that were not referenced in any of these databases.
A second shortcoming of the archival research by Hatchett et al. (2020) was its cross-sectional nature. A cross-section cannot directly answer the question as to whether publication rates might vary or decline over the course of counselor educators’ careers. Hatchett et al. (2020) and Lambie et al. (2014) found some evidence that journal article publications may decline over counselor educators’ careers. To better evaluate this phenomenon, Lambie et al. recommended that future researchers use a longitudinal research design that tracks publication counts across time. Not only would a longitudinal design better detect changes and trends in publication rates across time, but such a design could also better illuminate the extent to which counselor educators at comprehensive universities publish in peer-reviewed journals across their careers.
Purpose of the Present Study
Accordingly, the purpose of the current study was to use a longitudinal research design to summarize and track the rate of journal article publications by counselor educators at comprehensive universities over an extended period of time. Specifically, this study assessed the cumulative journal article publications attained by counselor educators at master’s-only counseling programs at comprehensive universities for the first 20 years since receiving their terminal degrees. A secondary objective of this study was to evaluate whether factors identified in previous research would also be useful for predicting journal article publication counts in this sample. Previous researchers have found that binary gender (Lambie et al., 2014; Newhart et al., 2020; Ramsey et al., 2002), faculty rank (Hatchett et al., 2020; Newhart et al., 2020; Ramsey et al., 2002), and year of degree completion (Hatchett et al., 2020; Lambie et al., 2014) predict journal article publication counts. Thus, these same three variables were used to predict cumulative journal article publication counts accrued by these counselor educators over the 20 years since their degree completion.
Method
Procedures and Participants
Because this study involved only the collection and analysis of publicly available data, the internal IRB determined this study was exempt from IRB oversight. As in the methodology used by Hatchett et al. (2020), a comprehensive university was operationally defined as an institution classified by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as a master’s-level institution with a designation of M1 (Larger programs), M2 (Medium programs), or M3 (Smaller programs). In addition, any M1, M2, or M3 institution was excluded from this study if it did not denote at least part of its faculty with traditional academic ranks (i.e., assistant professor, associate professor, professor) or if the program also offered a doctoral degree program in counseling or counselor education. The process for collecting data involved three steps. The first step was to identify CACREP-accredited master’s programs at comprehensive universities that met the abovementioned criteria.
As a result of this search process, 157 colleges and universities were identified for potential study inclusion. At the second step, the websites of these colleges and universities were searched to identify counselor educators with the rank of either associate or full professor. In addition to the rank of at least associate professor, a minimum of 20 years must have passed since the counselor educator received their doctoral degree to be included in this study. At the end of this process, 162 counselor educators were eventually identified. For each identified counselor educator, the following information was recorded: (a) name of the counselor educator, (b) Carnegie Classification of their current university, (c) inferred binary gender based on name and any contextual information, (d) type of terminal degree (e.g., PhD, EdD), (e) academic discipline of terminal degree, and (h) date of doctoral degree. If any of this data was not available on a counseling program’s website, additional public resources were searched, such as university catalogs, Dissertations Abstracts International, Google, and LinkedIn. There were six counselor educators for whom a terminal degree date could not be identified; these counselor educators were removed from the sample, leaving a final sample size of 156.
Count of Journal Article Publications
To identify journal article publications, each counselor educator’s name was searched through three major electronic databases: PsycINFO, ERIC, and Academic Search Complete. The beginning date for each search was the year following a counselor educator’s terminal degree date and the end date of the search was 20 years later. A journal article publication was operationally defined as any authored publication in a peer-reviewed journal indexed in any of the three databases that involved theory, counseling practice, quantitative research, qualitative research, mixed method research, or published responses to other published works; for the purpose of this study, editor notes and book reviews were excluded. The number of journal article publications for each counselor educator over the first 20 years after degree completion was summed to represent journal article publication counts.
Results
Data Analysis Strategy
Prior to conducting any analyses, the dataset was screened for data entry errors, unusual values, and extreme outliers; none were identified. Prior to running the negative binomial regression analysis, the categorical predictor variables (inferred binary gender, faculty rank) were dummy coded. All screening procedures and subsequent analyses were conducted using IBM SPSS (Version 28).
To predict journal article publication counts, a negative binomial regression analysis was conducted because the criterion variable, journal article publications, represented a count variable that contained a large number of zero values and the variance of the distribution exhibited overdispersion (Fox, 2008). Power estimates for negative binomial regression models are less developed than those available for linear models. Nonetheless, traditional power estimates for general linear models (Cohen, 1988) and experimental estimates for generalized linear models (Doyle, 2009; Lyles et al., 2007) suggested that the negative binomial regression analysis likely had sufficient statistical power (> .80) to detect at least medium effect sizes. The following assumptions for negative binomial regression were examined: multicollinearity, residual plots, independence of residual errors, and the presence of any highly influential cases. No difficulties were identified.
Ideally, a time series analysis is recommended for identifying trends or changes in longitudinal data across time (Yaffee & McGee, 2000). However, it is commonly recommended that a time series analysis should be based on a minimum of 50 observation periods (e.g., Tabachnick & Fidell, 2019). Power estimates for time series analyses can become very complex, and in some cases, 100 to 250 observational periods may be needed to reliably detect trends or seasonal patterns in time series data (Yaffee & McGee, 2000). It would not be feasible to track even a minimum of 50 years of journal article publications for a sizeable sample of counselor educators. Furthermore, inferential statistics—and accompanying power analyses—are needed for making inferences from a sample to the larger population from which the sample was drawn. Aside from inaccuracies on department websites, the counselor educators in this study represent the entire population of counselor educators at master’s-only programs in comprehensive universities who received their doctoral degrees at least 20 years ago. As Garson (2019) pointed out, “having data on all the cases in the population of interest eliminates the need for a random sample and, indeed, for significance testing at all” (p. 25). Consequently, the longitudinal analysis of this data will be limited to the creation and visual analysis of sequence charts.
Characteristics of the Sample
Regarding inferred binary gender, 51.9% (n = 81) of these counselor educators appeared to identify as female, and 48.1% (n = 75) appeared to identify as male. Two-thirds (n = 104, 66.7%) held the rank of full professor, and 33.3% (n = 52) held the rank of associate professor. The years in which they earned their terminal degrees ranged from 1970 to 2000 (Mdn = 1995.00, M = 1992.70, SD = 6.48). The number of years after earning their terminal degrees ranged from 20 to 50 (Mdn = 25.00, M = 27.30, SD = 6.48). Their terminal degrees included PhDs (n = 118, 75.6%), EdDs (n = 31, 19.9%), PsyDs (n = 4, 2.6%), and other (n = 3, 1.9%). Slightly over half of these faculty members had terminal degrees in counseling/counselor education (n = 80, 51.3%), followed in frequency by counseling psychology, clinical psychology, or educational psychology (n = 47, 30.1%); education (n = 13, 8.3%); rehabilitation or rehabilitation psychology (n = 10, 6.4%); and other (n = 6, 3.8%). Almost two-thirds (n = 102, 65.4%) were faculty at public universities with the remainder (n = 54, 34.6%) being faculty at private universities. Regarding current Carnegie Classifications, over four-fifths were faculty at M1 institutions (n = 128, 82.1%), which was followed in frequency by M2 institutions (n = 20, 12.8%) and M3 institutions (n = 8, 5.1%).
Journal Article Publication Counts
At the end of the first 20 years after receiving their terminal degrees, these counselor educators had accrued a median of three (M = 5.26, SD = 6.92) journal article publications referenced in at least one of the three electronic databases. Notably, a fourth of the sample (n = 39, 25%) did not have any journal article publications indexed in any of the electronic databases. Expressed on an annual basis, the entire sample of counselor educators had accrued a median of 0.15 (M = 0.26, SD = 0.35) journal articles each year for the first 20 years after completing their terminal degrees.
Prediction of Publication Counts
Based on prior research in counselor education (e.g., Hatchett et al., 2020; Lambie et al., 2014; Newhart et al., 2020; Ramsey et al., 2002), the next set of analyses evaluated whether cumulative journal article publication counts could be predicted from faculty rank, inferred binary gender, and year of terminal degree. In fitting a negative binomial regression model to the data, the likelihood ratio chi-square statistic was statistically significant, indicating that the three combined variables were useful for predicting publication counts: χ2(3, N = 156) = 21.22, p < .001, McFadden R2 = .024. All three predictor variables made unique contributions to the prediction of journal article publication counts (see Table 1). The estimated number of publications for full professors was 1.73 times higher (95% CI [1.18, 2.53]; p = .005) than for associate professors. For reference, over the first 20 years since degree completion, associate professors had accrued an average of 3.31 (SD = 5.52) journal article publications compared to an average of 6.24 (SD = 7.36) journal article publications for full professors. The estimated number of publications for male counselor educators was 1.45 times higher (95% CI [1.02, 2.06]; p = .037) than for female counselor educators. For reference, male counselor educators had accrued a mean of 6.17 (SD = 7.89) journal article publications compared to a mean of 4.42 (SD = 5.81) for female counselor educators. Finally, with each 1-year increase in terminal degree date, the estimated number of cumulative publications increased by 4.1% (95% CI [1.01, 1.07]; p = .005).
Table 1
Prediction of Journal Article Publication Counts From Faculty Rank, Inferred Binary Gender, and Terminal Degree Date
________________________________________________________________________________
Predictors B SE Wald χ2 p
________________________________________________________________________________
Faculty Rank .55 .19 8.01 .005
Inferred Binary Gender .37 .18 4.36 .04
Year of Terminal Degree .04 .01 7.75 .005
________________________________________________________________________________
Longitudinal Analyses
As reported previously, cumulative journal article publications varied as a function of both faculty rank and inferred binary gender. Because of this, two sequence charts were created to illuminate how journal article publication trajectories varied based on faculty rank and inferred binary gender. SPSS (Version 28) was used to create two sequence charts of the average number of journal article publications accrued each year for the first 20 years since degree completion. Figure 1 represents a sequence chart for journal article publications disaggregated by faculty rank. Figure 2 represents a sequence chart for journal article publications disaggregated by inferred binary gender.
Figure 1
Average Number of Journal Article Publications for Associate and Full Professors Over 20 Years After Degree Completion
Figure 2
Average Number of Journal Article Publications for Male and Female Counselor Educators Over 20 Years After Degree Completion
Discussion
The main objective of this study was to conduct a longitudinal analysis of the journal article publications of counselor educators at comprehensive universities for the first 20 years after receiving their doctoral degrees. A secondary objective was to evaluate how well these publication counts could be predicted from faculty rank, inferred binary gender, and year of terminal degree. Parallel to the results section, summary statistics will be discussed first, followed by the results of the regression analysis, and ending with the results of the longitudinal analyses.
Over the first 20 years since receiving their terminal degrees, the counselor educators in this sample had accrued a median of three (M = 5.26, SD = 6.62) journal article publications, which translates to a median of 0.15 (M = 0.26, SD = 0.35) journal articles published per year. Notably, a fourth (n = 39, 25%) of the sample did not have any journal article publications referenced in any of three major electronic databases. These findings are consistent with those of Hatchett et al. (2020), who investigated the journal article publications of this same population over a discrete 10-year period (2008–2017) using a similar methodology. They found that counselor educators at comprehensive universities had a median of 0.10 journal article publications each year, but a much higher proportion (46.4%) of their sample did not have any journal article publications referenced in any of the electronic databases. These differences may be the result of both the specific compositions of their samples and the timeframes for data collection. The current study examined the publication records of only associate and full professors, whereas Hatchett et al. (2020) examined the publication records of assistant, associate, and full professors of counselor education. Consistent with that expanded population, some of the counselor educators in the study by Hatchett et al. were just starting their careers and may not yet have attained many publications. There is also the possibility that some of the assistant professors in that study will be, or have been, turned down for promotion to associate professor because of inadequate scholarly productivity. Of course, it is not surprising that the current study, which examined a 20-year timeframe, uncovered a lower percentage of counselor educators without any journal article publications; after all, the counselor educators in the current study had double the time in which to accrue journal article publications.
Based on previous research in counselor education (Hatchett et al., 2020; Lambie et al., 2014; Newhart et al., 2020; Ramsey et al., 2002), this study also examined how well faculty rank, inferred binary gender, and year of terminal degree predicted journal article publication counts. Full professors had more journal article publications for the first 20 years after receiving their terminal degrees than those at the rank of associate professor. Not only would more publications be expected for a counselor educator at the rank of full professor, but other studies in counselor education have also found higher levels of scholarly productivity for full professors compared to associate professors (Hatchett et al., 2020; Ramsey et al., 2002). Although Lambie et al. (2014) found that associate professors had more journal article publications than full professors, their study included only counselor educators at doctoral-level programs and covered a discrete 6-year period of journal article publication counts. Thus, these two studies are not directly comparable. Several researchers have also found that male counselor educators attain more journal article publications than female counselor educators (Lambie et al., 2014; Newhart et al, 2020; Ramsey et al., 2002). Thus, the results from the current study are consistent with the majority of other research on this topic. Finally, in the current study, the date of terminal degree attainment had a minor impact on journal article publication counts. This is consistent with two other studies in the literature (Hatchett et al., 2020; Lambie et al., 2014). There are at least two plausible explanations for this finding. On the one hand, expectations for scholarly productivity have increased in recent years (Fairweather, 2005; Youn & Price, 2009); thus, it is not surprising that counselor educators who have attained their terminal degrees more recently have more journal article publications. From another perspective, Lambie et al. (2014) hypothesized that more recent graduates of counselor education programs may have stronger research skills than those who graduated earlier. Both explanations are speculative, so future research might better elucidate the role of time and training experiences on journal article publications.
The final objective of the study was to evaluate the extent to which journal article publication rates change over the course of counselor educators’ careers. The sequence charts presented in Figures 1 and 2 provide evidence that scholarly productivity is not invariant over the first 20 years since doctoral degree completion but tends to vary based on time, current academic rank, and inferred binary gender. There seems to be a relative peak around Year 7 for full professors and Year 14 for associate professors. The peak at Year 7 for full professors may be attributable to the typical timeframe for applying for tenure and promotion to associate professor; however, it is unclear why the associate professors exhibited a relative peak at Year 14. There also seems to be a peak around Year 7 for male counselor educators and Year 11 for female counselor educators. Again, the peak around Year 7 for male counselor educators is consistent with the typical timeframe for applying for tenure and promotion to associate professor. Though speculative, the delayed peak for female counselor educators may be the result of childbirth and early childcare responsibilities. Some research indicates that female faculty members plan childbirth around the academic calendar and tenure clock (e.g., Armenti, 2004), so perhaps a similar phenomenon occurred among the female counselor educators in this sample. More research is needed on how childbirth and childcare experiences impact the career decisions and scholarly productivity of female counselor educators (e.g., Trepal & Stinchfield, 2012). Finally, for the entire sample, there seems to be a relative decline in journal article publications near the end of the 20-year observational period. This lower level of scholarly productivity may reflect fewer institutional incentives to continue publishing, less interest in conducting original research, or a shift to other professional responsibilities, such as leadership positions on campus or in professional counseling associations.
Limitations
One clear limitation to the current study was the inability to apply a time series analysis to the data. As already mentioned, there were not enough observation periods to run a time series analysis with sufficient statistical power. In addition, the sequence charts were based on the average number of publications attained by these counselor educators on a yearly basis. The distribution of journal article publications for every observational unit was positively skewed, and the median number of publications for every observational unit was zero. Consequently, if the median number of publications each year had been plotted on the sequence charts, both graphs would have included two flat lines directly on the x-axis. Expressed differently, the typical counselor educator at a comprehensive university did not attain any journal article publications in a typical year. Thus, to some extent, the trends plotted in Figures 1 and 2 reflect only the most active researchers in this population.
It is also important to note that this study operationalized a very narrow definition of scholarly productivity: journal articles referenced in the PsycINFO, ERIC, or Academic Search Complete electronic databases. Though a highly reliable operational definition, and one used by other researchers (Barrio Minton et al., 2008; Hatchett et al., 2020; Lambie et al., 2014), this index certainly does not capture the full breadth of scholarly productivity. Counselor educators across all types of universities write book chapters and books, present at conferences, prepare reports, and secure external grant funding, among many other additional activities (e.g., Ramsey et al., 2002).
A final limitation of this study was the professional backgrounds of the counselor educators in this sample. Though all the counselor educators were faculty at CACREP-accredited programs, only about 50% had terminal degrees in counseling or counselor education. At the time of these counselor educators’ terminal degrees, CACREP did not stipulate that core faculty must have doctoral degrees in counselor education and supervision from CACREP-accredited programs. Even accounting for the grandfathering clause of 2013, a clear majority of the faculty in CACREP-accredited counseling programs now have doctoral degrees from CACREP-accredited counselor education and supervision programs (Hatchett, 2021). It is unknown whether this shift in the professional backgrounds of counselor education faculty will eventually impact the long-term trajectory of counselor educators at comprehensive universities.
Implications for Counselor Education
The results from the current study indicate that the typical counselor educator at a master’s-only counseling program at a comprehensive university will generate less than six journal article publications over the course of their career. Also, if these reported trends are stable across time, a significant minority will not attain any referenced journal article publications across their careers. These trends do not mean that counselor educators at comprehensive universities do not make meaningful contributions to the field of counseling in other ways, such as conference presentations, book chapters, grants, or evaluation reports (e.g., Ramsey et al., 2002). Also, as already mentioned, the electronic databases selected for this study and the study by Hatchett et al. (2020) do not capture all of the journals in which counselor educators publish. Nonetheless, it does reflect a relatively low level of original research published in peer-reviewed journals that is easily accessible through searching three popular electronic databases.
The results from this study—combined with the typical occupational outcomes of program graduates—should have implications for doctoral-level training in counselor education. As previously mentioned, all graduates of CACREP-accredited doctoral programs are required to acquire numerous research competencies that will equip them for making original and meaningful contributions to the counseling literature (CACREP, 2015). Yet, most graduates of these programs do not attain faculty positions in higher education, and among those who do, relatively few will be employed at research-intensive universities (e.g., Lawrence & Hatchett, 2022; Schweiger et al., 2012; Zimpfer, 1996). Furthermore, based on the distribution of CACREP programs across the Carnegie Classification System, program graduates who do secure faculty positions will be more likely to be employed at master’s-level universities than at institutions classified as R1 or R2.
It might be argued that the low rate of journal article publications produced by counselor educators at comprehensive universities is not problematic. Counselor educators at comprehensive universities spend proportionately more of their worktime on teaching and administrative tasks (Hatchett, 2021), and they often lack the institutional resources experienced by their colleagues at more research-intensive universities, such as access to research assistants (Henderson, 2011). Expecting counselor educators at comprehensive universities to do more research might be as fair as asking counselor educators at research-intensive universities to do more teaching and service (Hatchett et al., 2020). Yet, on the other hand, one should also consider what is being lost by the low levels of research found among many of the counselor educators at comprehensive universities. Many of these counselor educators are presumably not using the multitude of research competencies they developed during their doctoral-level training. The research training prescribed by CACREP is not just the means to a single end, a completed dissertation. One of the explicit training objectives of CACREP-accredited doctoral programs is to prepare program graduates to generate and disseminate new knowledge in the field of counseling (CACREP, 2015), an objective commonly discharged through publishing original research in peer-reviewed journal articles. The current study cannot resolve this conflict, but hopefully it will facilitate additional discussions on the value and role of research training in CACREP-accredited doctoral-level programs.
Recommendations for Future Research
One recommendation for future research, and one directly derived from the previous discussion, would be to investigate the extent to which graduates of CACREP-accredited doctoral programs use the skills and competencies acquired as part of their training. For example, researchers might investigate the extent to which program graduates use specific skills in teaching, research, grant work, clinical supervision, program evaluation, consultation, and clinical practice as part of their postgraduate occupations. The distributions of these actual work responsibilities could then be compared to the relative emphases of these competencies in doctoral-level training programs. Another recommendation for future research would be to replicate this study with counselor educators at universities with higher expectations of scholarly productivity, such as counselor educators at R1 or R2 universities, and those universities that offer CACREP-accredited doctoral degrees in counselor education, irrespective of Carnegie Classifications. Such research might identify trends and patterns in publication patterns for those counselor educators who are expected to produce and maintain higher levels of scholarly productivity over the entire course of their careers.
Conclusion
Consistent with the results of earlier research (Hatchett et al., 2020), the current study suggests that counselor educators at comprehensive universities—in general—publish minimal research in peer-reviewed journals. Furthermore, the journal article publications of these counselor educators exhibited a relative decline over the course of the first 20 years of the educators’ careers. These findings are somewhat in conflict with the accreditation standards delineated by CACREP and the objectives of doctoral-level training in counselor education. CACREP (2015) requires that all new core faculty have a doctoral degree in counselor education and supervision from accredited doctoral programs. These accredited doctoral programs stipulate that all program graduates attain numerous competencies in research and scholarship, irrespective of the graduates’ career plans. Yet, most graduates of CACREP-accredited doctoral programs do not attain faculty positions as counselor educators (Lawrence & Hatchett, 2022; Schweiger et al., 2012; Zimpfer, 1996), and for those who do, they are more likely to be employed at comprehensive universities at which scholarly productivity tends to be minimal than at more research-intensive universities at which high levels of scholarly productivity will be needed for promotion and tenure. Given these outcomes, counselor educators should revisit the nature of doctoral-level training and reevaluate the extent to which the curricula of CACREP-accredited programs prepare program graduates for the most common career pathways after graduation.
Conflict of Interest and Funding Disclosure
The authors reported no conflict of interest
or funding contributions for the development
of this manuscript.
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Dec 16, 2020 | Volume 10 - Issue 4
Gideon Litherland, Gretchen Schulthes
The aim of this study was to develop an understanding of the research scholarship focused on doctoral-level counselor education. Using the 2016 Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) doctoral standards as a frame to understand coverage of the research, we employed a scoping review methodology across four databases: ERIC, GaleOneFile, PsycINFO, and PubMed. Research between 2005 and 2019 was examined which resulted in identification of 39 articles covering at least one of the 2016 CACREP doctoral core areas. Implications for counseling researchers and counselor educators are discussed. This scoping research demonstrates the limited corpus of research on doctoral-level counselor education and highlights the need for future, organized scholarship.
Keywords: scoping review, doctoral-level counselor education, 2016 CACREP doctoral standards, counseling researchers, counselor educators
Counselor educators are positioned to be at the vanguard of research, teaching, and practice within the counseling profession (Okech & Rubel, 2018; Sears & Davis, 2003). The training of counselor educators is concentrated in the pursuit of doctoral degrees (e.g., PhD, EdD) in counselor education and supervision. Doctoral-level education of counselor educators is thus critical to the development of future leaders for the counseling profession (Goodrich et al., 2011). Counselor education doctoral students (CEDS) enrolled within programs accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) engage in advanced training in leadership, supervision, research, counseling, and teaching (CACREP, 2009, 2015; Del Rio & Mieling, 2012). CEDS complete academic coursework, participate in practicum and internship fieldwork, and deepen their professional counselor identity (Calley & Hawley, 2008; Limberg et al., 2013). Upon graduation, it is expected that CEDS are prepared to competently assume the responsibilities of a counselor educator. Counselor educators go on to work in any myriad of roles—professional and business leadership positions, academia, clinical and community settings, and consultation practices across the country (Bernard, 2006; Curtis & Sherlock, 2006; Gibson et al., 2015). It is imperative, then, for doctoral-level education to prepare and deliberately challenge these future counselor educators (Protivnak & Foss, 2009).
Historically, there have been concerns regarding the level of sustainability within the profession and the need for more qualified counselor educators (Isaacs & Sabella, 2013; Maples, 1989; Maples et al., 1993; Woo, Lu, Henfield, & Bang, 2017). Holding the terminal degree for the profession (Adkison-Bradley, 2013; CACREP, 2009; Goodrich et al., 2011), graduating CEDS meet the increasing demands across the country for trainers of a qualified workforce of school, college, rehabilitation, clinical mental health, addictions, and family counselors who can meet the psychosocial well-being needs of a diverse global population. There is an increasing need for counselors in all specialty areas, given recent projections of the next decade from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2019). The needs of communities (e.g., criminalization of mental illness; Bernstein & Seltzer, 2003; Dvoskin et al., 2020), training programs (e.g., multicultural counseling preparedness; Celinska & Swazo, 2016; Zalaquett et al., 2008), and public mental health issues (e.g., suicide; Gordon et al., 2020) reflect the urgency for a qualified workforce that can serve clients, students, and a global economy (Lloyd et al., 2010; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, n.d.-a, n.d.-b). Because of the demand for such a workforce, the counseling profession and its institutions must be prepared to educate counselor educators who, in turn, lead, teach, supervise, and mentor future generations of helping professionals. Given these market demands, it is important to consider: To what degree are CEDS being prepared to meet these demands in their post-graduation roles? How are CEDS being prepared to meet such demands? What evidence exists to guide the training and development of CEDS?
Based on available data from official CACREP annual reports, from 2012 to 2018, the number of CACREP-accredited counselor education doctoral programs increased from 60 to 85 (CACREP, 2013, 2019). In the same time period, the number of enrolled CEDS grew from 2,028 to 2,917. The number of doctoral program graduates similarly increased from 323 to 479. This interest and investment in accredited doctoral programs at universities across the country warrants greater research attention to better understand, focus on, and shape the doctoral-level education of future counselor educators. A great deal rests on preparation of future counselor educators as they maintain the primary responsibility for leading the profession as standard-bearers and gatekeepers.
Research on counselor education doctoral study is essential for improving and maintaining the efficacy of doctoral training because CEDS are the future leaders, faculty members, supervisors, and advocates of the profession. A critical step toward facilitating research on counselor education doctoral study is a scoping review (Tricco et al., 2018). Scoping review methodology has previously been used within counseling and mental health research (e.g., Harms et al., 2020; Meekums et al., 2016). Such a review can assist in constructing a snapshot of the breadth and focus of the extant research.
CACREP Core Areas as a Useful Framework for Analysis
The 2016 CACREP Standards (CACREP, 2015) delineate core areas of doctoral education and provide a meaningful and accessible framework appropriate to assess the state of doctoral-level education and training of CEDS. CACREP develops accreditation standards through an iterative research process that capitalizes on counseling program survey feedback, professional conference feedback sessions, and research within the counseling profession (Bobby, 2013; Bobby & Urofsky, 2008; Leahy et al., 2019; Williams et al., 2012). CACREP publishes updated accreditation standards that are publicly available online, on average, every 7 years (Perkins, 2017). The 2016 CACREP Standards (2015) articulate core areas of doctoral-level education and training in counselor education that align with professional expectations of performance upon graduation. These areas include leadership/advocacy, counseling, professional identity, teaching, supervision, and research. These core areas aim to guide faculty in fostering the development of counselor educator identity and professional competence.
The 2016 CACREP (2015) doctoral-level core areas serve as a professionally relevant framework to examine the extant research addressing doctoral-level education and training of CEDS. Previous research has utilized CACREP master’s-level core areas for content analysis (Diambra et al., 2011). Although much research within the field of counseling and other helping professions addresses the experiences and training needs of master’s-level practitioners, there is seemingly scant published research addressing the education and training of CEDS. To arrive at a clearer understanding of this gap, a framework of analysis (e.g., the 2016 CACREP doctoral-level core domains) is necessary in order to furnish a status report of the current research addressing doctoral-level education and training of CEDS.
Employing the 2016 CACREP (2015) doctoral standards core areas as a frame through which to view the research emphasizes the importance of accreditation and professional counselor identity. Doctoral core areas directly relate to the domain-driven framework employed in this study. In order to achieve a focused understanding of coverage of the CACREP core areas, the framework employed within this study conceptualizes each core area as a domain with two distinct differences: (a) distinguishing between leadership and advocacy in separate domains and (b) inclusion of professional identity as its own domain. The domains of our framework included Professional Identity, Supervision, Counseling, Teaching, Research, Leadership, and Advocacy. By systematically mapping the research conducted in each area of counselor education, we aimed to identify existing gaps in knowledge as a means to focus future research efforts. In this scoping review, the primary research question was “What is the coverage of the 2016 CACREP doctoral standards within the research over the past 15 years?” Research subquestions included (a) How many studies “fit” into each of the doctoral standard domains? (b) What frequency trends were present within the data related to type of research (qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods)? (c) What publication trends were present within the data related to (i) year of publication, (ii) profession-based affiliation of the publishing journal, and (iii) the publishing journal? and (d) What other foci emerged that were not addressed by the CACREP 2016 doctoral program standards?
Methods
In order to address the primary research question and related subquestions in a systematic way, the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocol (PRISMA-P; Moher et al., 2015) was considered. The PRISMA-P articulates critical components of a systematic review and aims to “reduce arbitrariness in decision-making” (Moher et al., 2015, p. 1) by facilitating a priori guidelines—with a goal of replicability. However, given the general-focus nature of the research question, the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR; Tricco et al., 2018) was more appropriate.
The PRISMA-ScR is an extension of the PRISMA-P with a broader focus on mapping “evidence on a topic and identify[ing] main concepts, theories, sources, and knowledge gaps” (Tricco et al., 2018, p. 467). The following steps, or items, of the PRISMA-ScR are described further in subsequent sections, including: primary and sub-research questions (Item 4), eligibility criteria (Item 5), exclusion criteria (Item 6), database sources (Item 7), search strategy (Item 8), data charting process (Item 10), data items (Item 11), and synthesis of results (Item 14). Items of the protocol not specifically listed here are satisfied by structural elements of this article (e.g., title [Item 1] and rationale [Item 3]).
Eligibility Criteria
For the present study, articles were only considered eligible for inclusion if they had been published in a peer-reviewed journal between 2005–2019. To be included in the study, articles were required to be research-based with an identified methodology (i.e., quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods), primarily focused on some aspect of counselor education doctoral study (e.g., program, student, faculty, outcomes, process), and published in the English language. Articles were considered primarily focused on counselor education doctoral study if their research questions, study design, and implications directly bore relevance to the scholarship of doctoral counselor education. Excluded from the study were published dissertation work, magazines, conference proceedings, and other non–peer-reviewed publications. Position, policy, or practice pieces; case studies; conceptual articles; and theoretical articles also were excluded. The primary focus of the study could not be outside of counselor education doctoral study.
Information Sources
To identify articles for inclusion, the following databases were searched: PubMed, ERIC, GaleOneFile, and PsycINFO. We also utilized reference review (backward snowballing) as an additional information source (Jalali & Wohlin, 2012; Skoglund & Runeson, 2009).
Search
Each database was searched with a specific keyword, “counselor education doc*,” followed by a topical search term. The asterisk (*) was deliberate in the search term to inclusively capture all permutations of “doc,” such as doctoral or doctorate. Search terms were derived from the rationale for the present study and CACREP doctoral core areas. The search terms were: “research,” “empirical,” “counseling,” “doctoral program standards,” “peer-reviewed research,” “CACREP,” “doctorate,” “quantitative,” “program,” “student,” “faculty,” “outcomes,” “process,” “professional identity,” “counseling,” “supervision,” “teaching,” “leadership,” and “advocacy.” Researchers divided the search terms, while maintaining the keyword “counselor education doc*,” and independently ran systematic searches using any eligibility criteria (e.g., inclusive years) that the database could sort. Inclusion criteria, including search terms and keyword, were entered into the search query tool and the results exported. Results from each database search were delineated on a yield list for later screening.
In order to increase methodological consistency among researchers, each utilized a search yield matrix (Goldman & Schmalz, 2004). Results from each researcher’s yield list were organized within the search yield matrix using three fields: article title, authors, and year of publication. This allowed for cleaner comparison of articles and continued identification of duplicates throughout the screening processes. Duplicate entries were collapsed to one citation so that only one entry per article remained, regardless of database origin. Each researcher conducted a preliminary screening of article titles with the inclusion criteria.
Selection of Sources of Evidence
In order to systematically screen articles and produce a final list for data collection, three levels of screening were conducted for the entire yield. Level 1, 2, and 3 screenings are described in detail below.
Level 1 Screening
Each researcher scanned their own yield list (duplicates removed). Every citation’s title was examined for preliminary eligibility. Researchers agreed to engage in an inclusive scan of titles and pass articles on to Level 2 screening if they seemed at all relevant to doctoral counselor education. Researchers indicated an article’s fitness for inclusion by a simple “yes” or “no” note on the Level 1 screening instrument. The yield from Level 1 screening was considered adequate for further review and moved on to Level 2 screening.
Level 2 Screening
Using the results from the Level 1 screening, each researcher scanned the other’s “for inclusion” list. Each citation’s abstract was examined for eligibility. Researchers indicated an article’s fitness for inclusion by a simple “yes” or “no” note on the Level 2 screening instrument. The yield from Level 2 screening was considered adequate for further review and moved on to Level 3 screening.
Level 3 Screening
Using the results from the Level 2 screening, researchers combined their lists and consolidated duplicates. Each article’s full text was examined for eligibility by each researcher. Researchers indicated an article’s fitness for inclusion by a simple “yes” or “no” note on the Level 3 screening instrument. In order to avoid bias or influence, each researcher conducted their screening work on a separate document. In reviewing eligibility indicators, researchers sought resolution through discussion, review of eligibility criteria, and assessment of an article’s scholarly focus. This process of Level 1, 2, and 3 screening resulted in a unified list.
Reference Review
In order to identify potential articles for inclusion that were missed or unintentionally excluded from the search process, researchers conducted a reference review strategy (Jalali & Wohlin, 2012; Skoglund & Runeson, 2009) on the unified list. The reference review consisted of examining the reference section of every article that was selected for inclusion in the unified list. Researchers examined the reference section for relevant titles (Level 1 screening) and endorsed each article according to “yes” or “no” for inclusion. If an article was determined possibly eligible for inclusion, a full-text examination (Level 3 screening) was conducted to determine further eligibility. Any articles determined to be eligible for inclusion were then added to the unified list.
Data Charting Process and Data Items
In the data charting process, we employed a matrix strategy (Goldman & Schmalz, 2004). Data was collected and organized within a data collection matrix instrument. We created the data collection matrix instrument to organize and focus data collection.
Data items included: year of publication, publishing journal, professional affiliation of publishing journal, type of methodology (e.g., qualitative, quantitative), and domain fitness (i.e., Counseling, Supervision, Teaching, Professional Identity, Research, Leadership, or Advocacy). If other themes were identified that did not fit within the domains, those were noted for later review.
To collect data, we divided the unified list into two halves and then independently charted the data for each citation in the data collection matrix instrument. To determine the professional affiliation of the publishing journal, we reviewed the public-facing website of each journal and reviewed the information available. To determine domain coverage, we reviewed the aim, research question(s), and discussion section of each article and compared the focus of the article to the 2016 CACREP doctoral core area descriptions. For example, if a study focused on the experience of CEDS becoming supervisors, this was coded as “Supervision.” If, however, a study’s aim and research question focused on an area of counselor education doctoral study that was not covered by a domain, then it was coded as “Other Focus.” Researchers discussed articles coded as “Other Focus” and worked to collapse similar foci under broad categories for ease of reporting.
Of note, researchers did not consider articles that utilized CEDS within a sample or participant pool as automatically eligible for inclusion. Studies were only included if doctoral-level counselor education was a key component or focal point of the research inquiry. Every effort was made to ensure study appropriateness for review based on these criteria.
Synthesis of Results
We analyzed the results after data collection through descriptive statistics and basic data visualization of trends (e.g., frequency, type). We discussed each research subquestion, considered what data best addressed the question, and reviewed data for any trends. Having described the process of the scoping review, the results of the study are presented next according to the preferred reporting items for scoping reviews (Tricco et al., 2018).
Results
Selection of Sources
A total of 9,798 citations were initially retrieved from the ERIC (n = 1,012), GaleOneFile (n = 327), PsycINFO (n = 1,298) and PubMed (n = 7,161) databases. After an initial review of citation type (e.g., book, white paper) and removal of duplicates, 3,076 articles remained. The Level 1 screening captured 2,599 ineligible articles not meeting the inclusion criteria. Therefore, at the end of the Level 1 screening, 477 citations remained. The Level 2 screening captured 292 ineligible articles that did not meet inclusion criteria, resulting in 185 articles. As researchers combined lists for Level 3 screening and identified duplicates, 185 articles reduced to 123. The Level 3 screening captured 52 ineligible articles that did not meet inclusion criteria, resulting in 71 articles for the unified list. Articles from the reference review yield (n = 9) were screened and added to the unified list. The unified list initially consisted of 80 citations. However, three articles were removed as a result of data cleaning (e.g., text-based differences not previously captured by sorting tool) and/or not meeting inclusion criteria (e.g., inaccuracies in published article’s references). Therefore, 77 articles were selected for inclusion within the present scoping review.
Coverage of CACREP Doctoral Domains
The results suggested that some trends exist within the literature focused on doctoral study within counselor education. Although there was coverage of each of the 2016 CACREP doctoral standards core areas within the last 15 years, it was quite minimal (see Table 1). Of our 77 identified studies, 39 studies (50.65%) mapped onto the seven-domain framework. This left 38 studies (49.35%) focusing on some other aspect of counselor education doctoral study, discussed further below.
Table 1
Domain Coverage as Addressed by Year
| Identified Domain |
Advocacy |
Counseling |
Leadership |
Professional Identity |
Research |
Supervision |
Teaching |
Total |
|
n |
n |
n |
n |
n |
n |
n |
n |
| Year |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 2006 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
1 |
0 |
2 |
| 2008 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
| 2009 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
| 2011 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
2 |
2 |
1 |
5 |
| 2012 |
0 |
2 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
2 |
| 2013 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
3 |
1 |
0 |
1 |
5 |
| 2014 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
1 |
2 |
0 |
4 |
| 2015 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
1 |
| 2016 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
2 |
1 |
5 |
| 2017 |
1 |
3 |
1 |
3 |
4 |
3 |
2 |
17 |
| 2018 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
2 |
1 |
0 |
1 |
5 |
| 2019 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
2 |
3 |
| Total |
1 |
9 |
2 |
10 |
10 |
11 |
8 |
51 |
Note. N = 51. Some articles met the criteria for more than one domain; therefore, the stated N is higher than the total number of articles identified. The years 2005, 2007, and 2010 are not included in the above table, as no articles that met the inclusion criteria and the established domains were published during those years.
Across the 15 years of literature examined in the current study, 39 studies covered the CACREP domains within our framework, but not necessarily with equal attention by scholars. To respond to the question “How many studies ‘fit’ into each of the doctoral standard domains?” we looked at the frequency of occurrence, per domain, across the 39 studies. Data indicated that Supervision was most frequently covered (n = 11), followed by Professional Identity (n = 10) and Research (n = 10). Domains with less than 10 studies over the 15-year time period included Counseling (n = 9), Teaching (n = 8), Leadership (n = 2), and Advocacy (n = 1). Of note, some articles mapped onto multiple domains during the coding process (see Appendix).
Methodological Trends
In determining frequency trends related to methodology, researchers analyzed each article’s research questions, method, and results section. Within the 39 domain-covering articles, there was a nearly equal emphasis between quantitative and qualitative research on doctoral counselor education. Of the domain-covering articles, 21 identified a clear quantitative methodology and 17 identified a clear qualitative methodology. Only one study identified a mixed-methods methodology and mapped onto the Professional Identity domain.
Publication Trends
The results did not indicate any identified trend within the year of publication. With regard to the professional affiliation of the publishing journal, 31 (79.49%) were published within counseling journals, and 8 (20.51%) were in interdisciplinary journals that were either topical (e.g., multicultural education) or methodologically (e.g., qualitative) focused.
Nearly half of the articles (n = 15) were published in Counselor Education and Supervision. The Professional Counselor was the second most frequent journal of publication (n = 5), followed by The Clinical Supervisor, Counseling Outcome Research and Evaluation, and the International Journal for the Advancement of Counselling, which each published two articles over the 15-year period (see Table 2).
The remaining journals—American Journal of Evaluation; Australian Journal of Rehabilitation Counselling; British Journal of Guidance & Counselling; Counseling and Values; Journal of Asia Pacific Counseling; Journal of College Counseling; Journal of Counseling & Development; Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development; Journal of Rehabilitation, Mindfulness, Multicultural Learning and Teaching; The Practitioner Scholar: Journal of Counseling and Professional Psychology (now: The Practitioner Scholar: Journal of the International Trauma Training Institute); and The Qualitative Report—each only had one published article that covered a domain within the 15-year period.
Other Emergent Themes
Several themes emerged across the 38 remaining articles that did not address a domain within our framework (see Table 3). These articles focused on some aspect of doctoral counselor education but considered some near-experience or program factor that did not directly link to CEDS’ learning, training, or skill acquisition. The most frequently occurring topics addressed by the scholarly literature were dissertations (n = 6), general student experience (n = 4), and persons of color (n = 4). Other identified themes include: admissions (n = 3), program culture (n = 3), attrition/persistence (n = 2), career planning (n = 2), comprehensive exams – student experience (n = 2), general wellness (n = 2), motherhood (n = 2), problematic behavior (n = 2), international students (n = 1), international students – student experience (n = 1), school counselor educators (n = 1), spirituality (n = 1), wellness in motherhood (n = 1), and workforce issues (n = 1).
Table 2
Number of Articles Addressing Domains by Journal
| Journal Name |
n |
| Counselor Education and Supervision |
15 |
| The Professional Counselor |
5 |
| The Clinical Supervisor |
2 |
| Counseling Outcome Research and Evaluation |
2 |
| International Journal for the Advancement of Counselling |
2 |
| American Journal of Evaluation |
1 |
| Australian Journal of Rehabilitation Counselling |
1 |
| British Journal of Guidance & Counselling |
1 |
| Counseling and Values |
1 |
| Journal of Asia Pacific Counseling |
1 |
| Journal of College Counseling |
1 |
| Journal of Counseling & Development |
1 |
| Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development |
1 |
| Journal of Rehabilitation |
1 |
| Mindfulness |
1 |
| Multicultural Learning and Teaching |
1 |
| The Practitioner Scholar: Journal of Counseling and Professional Psychology (now: The Practitioner Scholar: Journal of the International Trauma Training Institute) |
1 |
| The Qualitative Report |
1 |
| Total |
39 |
Note. N = 39. Only articles that met the inclusion criteria and covered at least one doctoral
domain are included.
Discussion
Given the importance of training doctoral-level counselor educators for the profession’s long-term growth and development, the results suggest minimal coverage of the CACREP doctoral standards core areas within the extant research. With little expectation of what we would find, this work is intentionally diagnostic of the current research scholarship focusing on doctoral counselor education. To date, no other scoping review research has focused on doctoral-level counselor education.
Given that only 39 articles satisfied our criteria, it is important to note that the scope of this review was limited to only research-based published literature. There may be valuable grey literature and scholarship focused on doctoral-level counselor education, but it was not captured within our narrow, predetermined scope. Another possible reason for our results may simply be a function of the profession’s emphasis on master’s-level training within the broader counseling literature. As the entry-level degree for the counseling profession, it comports with expectations that master’s-level training would, therefore, be more represented within the literature. Further, it may be the early developmental stage of the counseling profession that, in part, explains the lack of attention to doctoral-level counselor education. Additionally, the research-to-practice gap within the counseling profession may also explain the minimum coverage of the CACREP core areas within our results. For a detailed discussion of the research-to-practice gap in the counseling profession, see Lee et al. (2014).
Table 3
Number of Articles Addressing Other Foci Beyond Domains
| Other Focus |
n |
| Dissertations |
6 |
| Persons of Color |
4 |
| Admissions |
3 |
| Program Culture |
3 |
| Attrition/Persistence |
2 |
| Career Planning |
2 |
| Motherhood |
2 |
| Problematic Behavior |
2 |
| International Students |
1 |
| School Counselor Educators |
1 |
| Spirituality |
1 |
| Student Experience |
|
| General |
4 |
| Comprehensive Exams |
2 |
| International Students |
1 |
| Wellness |
|
| General |
2 |
| Wellness in Motherhood |
1 |
| Workforce Issues |
1 |
| Total |
38 |
Note. N = 38. Each article identified as having another focus
was only placed into one category.
Domain-Specific Discussion
Across the domains, there was notably uneven coverage. With the highest occurrence (n = 11), Supervision may be more extensively covered because it is a skillset that is well-emphasized within counselor education and supervision doctoral programs. Supervision, as a professional skillset, also has significant interprofessional interest, relevance, and marketability. Professional Identity (n = 10) as a focus of doctoral-level research makes sense given the past two decades’ emphasis on unifying the profession and the resultant professional discourse around professional identity (Kaplan & Gladding, 2011). As CEDS experience a transition in their identity from practitioner to educator/researcher, professional identity is a natural topic of inquiry (Dollarhide et al., 2013). Similarly, as research skill and identity development have been an important part of the counselor education discourse (Lamar et al., 2019; Okech et al., 2006), it follows that Research (n = 10) would be tied for second in coverage of the CACREP core areas. Counseling (n = 9) was covered within the literature, somewhat surprisingly, more frequently than other domains that are considered foundational to the role of a counselor educator (Okech & Rubel, 2018), such as Teaching and Leadership.
The research covering Teaching (n = 8) and doctoral-level counselor education has received scant attention across the 15-year period. There are likely a few historical factors that have influenced this result. Most notably, doctoral training, specifically of PhDs, has not emphasized teaching, but rather the development of the subject expert (Kot & Hendel, 2012). And although counselor educators consider the training, teaching, and supervision of counselors-in-training to be a critical part of their work, the effectiveness of their teaching preparation remains a critical research topic (Association of Counselor Education and Supervision [ACES] Teaching Initiative Taskforce, 2016; Barrio Minton et al., 2018; Suddeath et al., 2020; Waalkes et al., 2018). Teaching also may not be as robustly covered of a domain in the research because of the historical reliance on other disciplines’ theories, andragogies, and practices or the absence of a collective, focused research agenda (ACES Teaching Initiative Taskforce, 2016).
Finally, although Leadership (n = 2) and Advocacy (n = 1) were covered within the research, the strikingly low occurrences of coverage stand in stark contrast to the profession’s stated values. Leadership is a robust area of scholarship outside of the profession of counseling and it is considered a critical part of doctoral counselor education (Chang et al., 2012). It may be that a significant amount of leadership-focused literature is primarily conceptual or theoretical in nature and thus did not meet the inclusion criteria. The absence in our results of research-driven discourse around doctoral-level leadership is noteworthy for those training the future leaders of the profession. Similarly, though advocacy has been discussed as a critical part of counselor practice (Toporek et al., 2010), it has also received little attention within the doctoral-level counselor education research. One possible reason for the minimal attention could be the seeming devaluation of advocacy within traditional conceptualizations of faculty scholarship (e.g., research, teaching; Ramsey et al., 2002). Perhaps, then, there is a “fitness” issue between professional advocacy skills and job responsibilities.
Other Foci
These articles (n = 38) focused on some aspect of doctoral counselor education but also considered some element that did not directly link to CEDS’ learning, training, or skill acquisition. This may suggest a general interest in the experience and context of CEDS within the literature that simply did not map onto our scoping frame. The rationale for such non-domain, other-focused research likely lies in the counseling profession’s tacit understanding that education is a holistic endeavor and not solely driven by accreditation (Dickens et al., 2016).
There is value in this research that focuses on other aspects of the doctoral counselor education experience. If the profession is to value the role of accreditation in fostering quality education across the country, then it remains vital to build out a research base that bears relevance to both program accreditation and other variables related to the doctoral experience.
Limitations
In selecting the methodology for this study, researchers aimed to reduce limitations and increase rigor through the adoption of a protocol. Despite using the scoping review protocol, limitations of this study are evident and worth considering for future replications, particularly related to the search strategy, inclusion criteria, and the stringent focus on counselor education.
In designing the search strategy, researchers limited search terms to the most proximal to the CACREP doctoral core areas. Because of the limited set of search terms used, the search strategy may not have captured an exhaustive list of all eligible citations for inclusion. A possible solution to address this in future studies is the addition of broader spectrum search terms and automated search engines, such as Publish or Perish (Harzing, 2010).
Citations were only included if they were peer-reviewed, research-based articles; no grey literature was included. However, future scoping reviews may consider including grey literature (research-based or not research-based) in order to get a broader understanding of the existing scholarship focusing on doctoral counselor education.
By design, this study focused solely on “counselor education,” to the deliberate exclusion of “counseling psychology,” the profession’s historical cousin within the field of psychology. Counselor education is, however, also a terminology used primarily within the United States, and many countries do not differentiate these fields as distinctly as the United States (Bedi, 2016). As such, the possibility exists that some international articles that may contribute to the conversation on doctoral counselor education have not been captured within this review. Including counseling psychology in future studies may result in a more comprehensive yield, but the education and accreditation differences between the two professions is worthy to note.
Implications for Research
In the absence of clear parameters to assess our results, we may consider this study as an initial diagnostic baseline in a larger effort to identify knowledge gaps and set shared research agendas (Tricco et al., 2016). Notable in the results is the lack of a sustained scholarship addressing doctoral-level counselor education. As research excellence remains a priority for the counseling profession (Kaplan & Gladding, 2011; Kline, 2003; Wester & Borders, 2014), counseling scholars require strategies to construct a long-term research agenda exploring doctoral-level counselor education and directly informing training. Such strategies may include regular assessments of the scope of the research (such as this study), a community of collaborative researchers, and professional association support and showcasing. In developing a clear understanding of doctoral-level counselor education, researchers may then work toward defining effectiveness, evaluation, and excellence in doctoral preparation. Further, for researchers interested in publishing in this area of scholarship, it may be useful to consider the publishing journal results in order to compare editorial fitness for manuscript publication. All domains considered warrant further attention and scholarly investigation.
Implications for Counselor Educators
In light of the 39 research-driven articles focusing on doctoral counselor education published from 2005–2019, it is critical to wonder if this is a robust enough evidence base to inform program-wide decision-making for doctoral training programs. For example, in a cursory review of the counseling literature, few published textbooks exist that specifically address doctoral-level counselor education domains, such as teaching (McAuliffe & Eriksen, 2011; West et al., 2013) or research (Balkin & Kleist, 2016) and at-large issues (Flamez et al., 2017; Homrich & Henderson, 2018; Okech & Rubel, 2018). To move beyond adapting master’s-level curriculum for more advanced practice, as may be appropriate for experienced professional counselors, counselor educators require a specific body of literature, tools, and strategies for developing doctoral counselor education programs that meet or exceed CACREP standards.
As doctoral-level preparation has previously been identified as vital for the long-term growth of the profession (Sears & Davis, 2003), doctoral program directors, faculty, and staff would benefit from the development of, for example, a specialized andragogy, professional identity, and best practices for implementation. Such a corpus of research evidence and praxis knowledge of doctoral-level counselor education could inform professional development workshops and resources focused on fostering doctoral student development. The results of the current study suggest an urgent need to address such gaps in our empirical body of evidence for application to counselor education doctoral programs.
Implications for the Counseling Profession
CACREP, as the accrediting body for counseling programs across the country, assumes the responsibility for setting the standard of professional preparation for doctoral learners. By articulating clear and robust standards for doctoral programs, CACREP advances a framework that aims to produce competent counselor educators. It is essential to consider the extant conceptual, empirical, and experience base. Within this scoping review, findings indicate a seemingly impoverished empirical base covering the domains for doctoral-level counselor education. Other authors have called for further empirical inquiry of the CACREP standards, with particular respect to the evidence base for teaching preparation. In the ACES Teaching Initiative Taskforce (2016) Final Report, the authors wondered, “To what degree do current [2016] CACREP standards capture knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed for effective teaching practice in counselor education?” (p. 36). To extend this question, it may also be asked, “To what degree do the current CACREP standards capture the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to be an effective counselor educator post-graduation?” Additionally, “What empirical base can we draw from to inform our training of future counselor educators?”
CACREP is actively engaged in promoting research on the impact of accreditation and is thus uniquely positioned to encourage focused scholarship to develop a research base for future iterations of the doctoral standards. In order to meaningfully shape and encourage scholarly research, counseling organizations should embrace opportunities for collaboration. Extending cooperative partnerships with professional associations, such as ACES, may prove especially fruitful for CACREP, and the larger counseling profession, in constructing a professional scholarly discourse around research of doctoral-level preparation. Such strategies that could stimulate research focused on doctoral-level preparation in counselor education may include: facilitating research-incubation initiatives; increasing the availability and amount of funding for such research; and the regular publication of briefs, syntheses, or memoranda that promote research-based or empirically driven preparation practices.
Conclusion
If doctoral preparation of counselor educators is to advance in a research-informed way, then the scholarship of doctoral-level training is valuable. Calling for more research is not the final conclusion of this study. Rather, if doctoral-level counselor education is to remain important to the profession, then the profession would benefit from an organized, focused, and high-quality scholarship of doctoral-level training. Doctoral programs, counselor educators, and the profession would benefit from a robust corpus of scholarship that directly impacts decision-making, andragogy, and professional identity development. With minimal research covering the identified doctoral-level domains, an opportunity exists to engage in critical reflection on the existing scholarship and evidence that form the foundational architecture of doctoral-level education within the counseling profession. This research seeks to assist in identifying the gaps in the current body of published research literature on doctoral-level counselor education and inform future research activity.
Conflict of Interest and Funding Disclosure
The authors reported no conflict of interest
or funding contributions for the development
of this manuscript.
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Appendix
Articles and Associated Domain Coverage
| Title |
Author |
Year |
Domains |
| An Exploration of the Perceived Impact of Post-Master’s Experience on Doctoral Study in Counselor Education and Supervision |
Farmer et al. |
2017 |
Advocacy, Counseling, Leadership, Professional Identity, Research, Supervision, Teaching |
| Mindfulness and Counseling Self-Efficacy: The Mediating Role of Attention and Empathy |
Greason, P. B., & Cashwell, C. S. |
2009 |
Counseling |
| Perceived Competency in Working with LGB Clients: Where Are We Now? |
Graham et al. |
2012 |
Counseling |
| Faith as A Cultural Variable: Implications for Counselor Training |
Scott et al. |
2016 |
Counseling |
| Collecting Multidimensional Client Data Using Repeated Measures: Experiences of Clients and Counselors Using The CCAPS-34 |
Martin et al. |
2012 |
Counseling |
| Counselor Education Students’ Exposure to Trauma Cases |
Lu et al. |
2017 |
Counseling |
| Multicultural Implications of the Influence of Ethnicity and Self-Efficacy for Students and Counselor Educators |
Maldonado, J. M. |
2008 |
Counseling |
| Examining the Relationship Between Mindfulness and Multicultural Counseling Competencies in Counselor Trainees |
Campbell et al. |
2018 |
Counseling, Professional Identity |
| Critical Readings for Doctoral Training in Rehabilitation Counseling: A Consensus-Building Approach |
Bishop et al. |
2017 |
Counseling, Professional Identity, Research, Supervision, Teaching |
| Perceived Leadership Preparation in Counselor Education Doctoral Students Who Are Members of the American Counseling Association in CACREP-Accredited Programs |
Lockard et al. |
2014 |
Leadership |
| Mexican American Women Pursuing Counselor Education Doctorates: A Narrative Inquiry |
Hinojosa, T. J., & Carney, J. V. |
2016 |
Professional Identity |
| A “Chameleonic” Identity: Foreign-Born Doctoral Students in U.S. Counselor Education |
Interiano, C. G., & Lim, J. H. |
2018 |
Professional Identity |
| Professional Identity Development in Counseling Professionals |
Woo, H., Lu, J.,
Harris, C., & Cauley, B. |
2017 |
Professional Identity |
| Professional Identity Development of Counselor Education Doctoral Students: A Qualitative Investigation |
Limberg et al. |
2013 |
Professional Identity |
| Professional Identity Development of Counselor Education Doctoral Students |
Dollarhide et al. |
2013 |
Professional Identity |
| Title |
Author |
Year |
Domains |
| Fostering Connections Between Graduate Students and Strengthening Professional Identity Through Co-Mentoring |
Murdock et al. |
2013 |
Professional Identity |
| Pedagogical Perspectives on Counselor Education: An Autoethnographic Experience of Doctoral Student Development |
Elliott et al. |
2019 |
Professional Identity, Teaching |
| Evidence for the Mitigating Effects of a Support Group for Attitudes Toward Statistics |
Lenz et al. |
2013 |
Research |
| The Authorship Determination Process in Student–Faculty Collaboration Research |
Welfare, L. E., & Sackett, C. R. |
2011 |
Research |
| Understanding the Researcher Identity Development of Counselor Education and Supervision Doctoral Students |
Lamar, M. R., & Helm, H. M. |
2017 |
Research |
| Doctoral Counselor Education Students’ Levels of Research Self-Efficacy, Perceptions of the Research Training Environment, and Interest in Research |
Lambie, G. W., & Vaccaro, N. |
2011 |
Research |
| Doctoral Research Training of Counselor Education Faculty |
Okech et al. |
2006 |
Research |
| Advisory Relationship as a Moderator Between Research Self-Efficacy, Motivation, and Productivity Among Counselor Education Doctoral Students |
Kuo et al. |
2017 |
Research |
| Research Training in Doctoral Programs Accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs |
Borders et al. |
2014 |
Research |
| Program Evaluation in Doctoral-Level Counselor Education Preparation: Concerns and Recommendations |
Sink, C. A., & Lemich, G. |
2018 |
Research |
| International Doctoral Students in Counselor Education: Coping Strategies in Supervision Training |
Woo et al. |
2015 |
Supervision |
| A Qualitative Study of Challenges Faced by International Doctoral Students in Counselor Education Supervision Courses |
Jang et al. |
2014 |
Supervision |
| Becoming a Supervisor: Qualitative Findings on Self-Efficacy Beliefs of Doctoral Student Supervisors-in-Training |
Frick, M. H., & Glosoff, H. L. |
2014 |
Supervision |
| Becoming a Supervisor: Doctoral Student Perceptions of the Training Experience |
Nelson et al. |
2006 |
Supervision |
| New Supervisors’ Struggles and Successes With Corrective Feedback |
Borders et al. |
2017 |
Supervision |
| A Delphi Study and Initial Validation of Counselor Supervision Competencies |
Neuer Colburn et al. |
2016 |
Supervision |
| Supervisee Incompatibility and Its Influence on Triadic Supervision: An Examination of Doctoral Student Supervisor’s Perspectives |
Hein et al. |
2011 |
Supervision |
| Examining the Status of Supervision Education in Rehabilitation Counsellor Training |
Pebdani et al. |
2016 |
Supervision |
| Student Reflections on the Journey to Being a Supervisor |
Rapisarda et al. |
2011 |
Supervision |
| Learning to Teach: Teaching Internships in Counselor Education and Supervision |
Hunt, B., & Gilmore, G. W. |
2011 |
Teaching |
| Teaching Competencies in Counselor Education: A Delphi Study |
Swank, J. M. |
2019 |
Teaching |
| Structure, Impact, and Deficiencies of Beginning Counselor Educators’ Doctoral Teaching Preparation |
Waalkes et al. |
2018 |
Teaching |
| Coteaching in Counselor Education: Preparing Doctoral Students for Future Teaching |
Baltrinic et al. |
2016 |
Teaching |
| Observing the Development of Constructivist Pedagogy in One Counselor Education Doctoral Cohort: A Single Case Design |
McCaughan et al. |
2013 |
Teaching |
Note. N = 39. Only articles that met the inclusion criteria and covered at least one doctoral domain are included.
Inspiration for this research stemmed from the completion of a doctoral-level course assignment developed by Dr. Deborah Rubel, an associate professor at Oregon State University. Gideon Litherland, PhD, NCC, CCMHC, ACS, BC-TMH, LCPC, is a core faculty member in the Counseling@Northwestern site of the Counseling Program at the Family Institute at Northwestern University. Gretchen Schulthes, PhD, NCC, LAC, is the Associate Director of Advisement and Transfer at Hudson County Community College. Correspondence may be addressed to Gideon Litherland, 618 Library Place, Evanston, IL 60201, gideon.litherland@northwestern.edu.
