|
Article Excerpt
Forty-five counselor educators and 62 master's-level counseling students were surveyed to compare faculty members' perceptions of trainee competence with students' own views. As anticipated, students reported higher deficiency rates than did their faculty. Combined with the intervention rates reported by corresponding faculty, students' reports suggested that as many as 21% of their peers may be professionally deficient and that the majority of these may progress through their training without remediation. Together with students' anticipated reactions to their own identification for remediation or dismissal, these findings underscore the importance of implementing effective procedures for reviewing the professional fitness of counselors-in-training.
**********
A great deal of recent literature has explored the prevalence of professionally deficient trainees in mental health training programs, that is, trainees thought to be poorly or marginally suited for the field due to interpersonal, emotional, skills-based, or other professional fitness reasons (e.g., Baldo, Softas-Nall, & Shaw, 1997; Gaubatz & Vera, 2002a; Gizara & Forrest, 2004; Hensley, Smith, & Thompson, 2003; Huprich & Rudd, 2004; Oliver, Bernstein, Anderson, Blashfield, & Roberts, 2004; Procidano, Busch-Rossnagel, Reznikoff, & Geisinger, 1995; Schoener, 1999; Vacha-Haase, Davenport, & Kerewsky, 2004). Such trainees, once thought to constitute between 4% and 5% of students enrolled in master's- and doctoral-level programs, may be more prevalent than previously realized. Whereas previous reports of student deficiency included only those students identified for remediation or dismissal each year, the inclusion of unremediated students in estimates of student deficiency suggests that, according to their faculty, as many as 10% of trainees in master's-level programs may be poorly or marginally suited for clinical work (Gaubatz & Vera, 2002a).
Despite the ubiquity of research into this topic, a significant gap remains relatively unexplored: the views of students themselves. As Forrest, Elman, Gizara, and Vacha-Haase (1999) suggested, because students interact in multiple contexts, they may observe facets of their peers' behavior that remain opaque to their faculty. Students' perceptions of their peers thus could either confirm or rebut their faculty members' reports. In addition, students' views might inform the design of more effective trainee gatekeeping interventions.
To date, only two studies, a 1991 investigation by Mearns and Allen and a 2004 multiauthored study (Oliver et al., 2004), have explored this perspective, neither of which included the views of counseling trainees. Surveying 73 clinical psychology students and their faculty, Mearns and Allen found that 95% of students reported they were aware of impaired trainees among their peers. Whereas Mearns and Allen reported that 42% of students had confronted such peers themselves, they did not assess whether students' perceptions matched those of their faculty or whether the deficient peers they observed were eventually remediated or dismissed by their programs. Similarly, by combining a qualitative survey with two questions similar to those used in early components of the current investigation (Gaubatz & Vera, 2002a, 2002b), Oliver et al. found that students in doctoral clinical psychology programs "commonly reported frustration with and concern for impaired colleagues" (p. 141), in part because they thought their programs were doing too little to intervene with these colleagues. Matching preliminary analyses of the present findings, Oliver et al. found that students' estimates of deficiency among their peers was "quite high" (approximately 12% of their peers; p. 143), although the exploratory nature of their design precluded them from comparing students' views with those of faculty in corresponding programs.
As these studies highlight, students' views of their peers' fitness is an aspect of professional gatekeeping in mental health training programs that is ripe for investigation. As Forrest et al. (1999) observed, "much more research is needed to better understand the accuracy and misconceptions [of the views] faculty and students hold of each other when it comes to ... impaired trainees" (p. 677). By broadening Mearns and Allen's (1991) and Oliver et al.'s (2004) investigations to permit comparisons between the views of students and faculty members in corresponding counselor training programs and by exploring relationships of discrepancies between these views and programs' use of formalized gatekeeping procedures, the present study was intended to contribute to this task.
The purpose of this study was to compare counselor education students' and faculty members' perceptions of trainee deficiency and to learn how effectively deficient trainees are identified and remediated across programs. As a follow-up to an investigation of the effectiveness of formalized gatekeeping policies in identifying and remediating deficient counseling trainees (Gaubatz & Vera,...
|
