Continuum of Counseling Goals: A Framework for Differentiating Counseling Strategies

Counseling process goals are presented in a developmental continuum similar in concept to Maslow's hierarchy of needs with implications for counseling practice.     

Professional Women's Midcareer Satisfaction: Toward an Explanatory Framework

For the last two decades, professional women have entered the workforce at an unprecedented pace. Despite their labor force participation rates, numerous studies reveal that professional women face stereotyping, struggle with bias in performance appraisal, promotion, and salary, and are confronted with serious work/life tradeoffs as they climb the corporate ladder. Yet, relatively little is known about how satisfied professional women are with their careers, particularly as they move beyond entry level into midcareer. What are the critical factors that explain women's midcareer satisfaction? What factors explain differences among women in their midcareer satisfaction? Drawing on streams of research in gender and organizations, careers, sociology, and psychology, this paper begins to map out key demographic, career history, organizational, job, and stress factors proposed to explain professional women's midcareer satisfaction. Directions for future research are highlighted.

     

A Framework for Sex Role Counseling

The androgyny model of masculinity and femininity serves as the basis for a framework for sex role counseling applicable to both sexes. A conceptualization of individual differences in sex role-related characteristics suggests criteria for personal sex role adjustment other than universal conformity to traditional sex role requirements. It is suggested that consistency among an individual's feminine and masculine self-attributions, sex role ideals, environmental demands with their accompanying rewards and costs, and the behavioral repertoire available for dealing with current situations is needed for a comfortable sense of self as a woman or man. Examples of sex role problems, counseling goals, and interventions are described within this framework. Sex role counseling thus requires a clear comprehension of the impact of sex roles on a personal level.     

Genetic Counseling Milestones: A Framework for Student Competency Evaluation

Graduate medical education has recently increased focus on the development of medical specialty competency milestones to provide a targeted tool for medical resident evaluation. Milestones provide developmental assessment of the attainment of competencies over the course of an educational program. An educational framework is described to explore the development of Genetic Counseling Milestones for the evaluation of the development of genetic counseling competencies by genetic counseling students. The development of Genetic Counseling Milestones may provide a valuable tool to assess genetic counseling students across all program activities. Historical educational context, current practices, and potential benefits and challenges in the development of Genetic Counseling Milestones are discussed.     

Career Counseling and Reality Therapy: A Conceptual Flowchart

Reality therapy is a cognitive behavioral approach but has not been developed for, nor associated with, career counseling. This article discusses the role of reality therapy in career counseling, with the aid of a flowchart model to present the particulars of the system.     

"状态改变:状态继续"与"做:不做"

检查了“做／不做”这对概念的不足后．本文用“状态改变／状态继续”来替代“做／不做”。在“状态改变-状态继续”框架基础上将事件分为“整体事件”和“分段事件”。研究证实“做／不做”只适合于“整体事件”而不适合“分段事件”。最后．该框架部分也解释了长期存在于实验研究与现场研究中的假设思想所表现出的差异。     

Root Metaphor Theory: A Philosophical Framework for Counseling and Psychotherapy

By exploring alternative worldviews or philosophical frames of reference, counselors can look beyond their own encapsulated images of reality and examine different assumptions concerning the nature of psychological phenomena and the process of change. The present article offers an overview of the root metaphors and philosophical assumptions associated with formism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism—the four worldviews described in Pepper's (1942) philosophical treatise and his presentation of root metaphor theory. Recent and historical trends of development in counseling theory and practice are examined within the context of Pepper's metaphilosophical system.     

The Risk-Based View of Trust: A Conceptual Framework

Trust and risk have often been linked in the literature, but their relationship is far from clear. Trust has been used in three different ways — namely, as a perception (subjective trust), as various personal and situational factors that lead to subjective trust (trust antecedents), and as the actions resulting from subjective trust (behavioral trust). We explain how risk is related to these three conceptions of trust. First, we argue that subjective trust and perceived risk are in fact mirror images of each other. Second, we show how behavioral trust can be viewed as risk taking, so that the causal relationship between subjective trust and behavioral trust is similar to that of perceived risk and risk taking. And third, we discuss the role of personal characteristics (such as risk propensity and trust propensity) in the risk–trust relationship. We also develop a number of propositions based on our risk-based view of trust.     

Strategies for Counseling Infertile Couples

Approximately one in six couples experience problems with their fertility in terms of conceiving and/or carrying a viable pregnancy to term. The infertile couple's need for counseling and support has been emphasized consistently in the literature. This article presents specific intervention strategies that may serve to reinforce the infertility experience as an opportunity for personal and marital growth.     

Genetic Counseling as a Tool for Type 2 Diabetes Prevention: A Genetic Counseling Framework for Common Polygenetic Disorders

Advances in genetic epidemiology have increased understanding of common, polygenic preventable diseases such as type 2 diabetes. As genetic risk testing based on this knowledge moves into clinical practice, we propose that genetic counselors will need to expand their roles and adapt traditional counseling techniques for this new patient set. In this paper, we present a genetic counseling intervention developed for a clinical trial [Genetic Counseling/Lifestyle Change for Diabetes Prevention, ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT01034319] designed to motivate behavioral changes for diabetes prevention. Seventy-two phenotypically high-risk participants received counseling that included their diabetes genetic risk score, general education about diabetes risk factors, and encouragement to participate in a diabetes prevention program. Using two validated genetic counseling scales, participants reported favorable perceived control and satisfaction with the counseling session. Our intervention represents one model for applying traditional genetic counseling principles to risk testing for polygenetic, preventable diseases, such as type 2 diabetes.     

A Framework for the Improvement of Test Interpretation in Counseling

Frequent counselor errors in test interpretation include presenting test results too soon, interpreting them without reference to clearly defined criteria, erroneously assuming their validity, and failing to present them in terms the student can understand. These errors can be reduced through emphasis on the student's felt need for information, helping him state his questions operationally, basing interpretive statements on empirical validity, and by communicating test results in an understandable manner. Observations of behavior to determine student acceptance of the interpretation as well as self-report to determine recall and understanding of the interpretation should be used. The focus of evaluation should be on student recall, understanding, and acceptance of predictions derived from test results.     

Processes Involved in Adult Ego Development: A Conceptual Framework

Ego development has been found to stabilize by early adulthood among the majority of the population, at a stage which is well below the maximum potential. The modal stage of stabilization is one which involves rudimentary self-awareness and incipient conceptual complexity. The reasons for this early stabilization below the maximum potential are not fully understood. In this article, a conceptual framework is formulated to explain the processes involved in ego-stage transition in adulthood. The formulation is based on Loevinger's theoretical reflections on adult ego-stage transition and the associated research, the intervention programs designed to promote adult ego development, the theory and research in relation to moral-stage development in adulthood, and the theory and research in relation to general personality change in adulthood. In the resulting framework, it is proposed that ego-stage transition in adulthood represents an accommodative response to specific types of life experiences and that the degree of exposure to such life experiences, as well as the perception of and response to the life experience, is influenced by specific psychological characteristics. Specific research hypotheses follow from the proposed framework, and these are outlined with suggestions for empirical tests.     

Chronic Illness and the Life Cycle:A Conceptual Framework

This article provides a conceptual framework for thinking about the system created at the interface of chronic illness with the family life cycle. First, a psychosocial typology and time phases of illness schema is described as a necessary, preliminary step to create a common language that bridges the worlds of illness, individual, and family development. This schema organizes similarities and differences between diseases in a manner useful to psychosocial-developmental rather than biomedical inquiry. Then, drawing on several major life-cycle theories in the literature, key concepts (periods of transition, life-structure building and maintaining, centripetality, and centrifugality) are used in a complementary fashion to link these three lines of development. Equipped with these psychosocial languages, consideration is given to transgenerational aspects of illness, loss, and crisis, and the interwoven threads of illness, family, and individual development. Clinical vignettes are provided to highlight this conceptual framework.