The Use of Strategic Family Therapy in the School Setting: A Case Study

The authors describe a school counselor's shift from a traditional, individualized counseling approach to the use of strategic family therapy as a way of helping a young man succeed in school and leave home.     

Women's Postrape Sexual Functioning: Review and Implications for Counseling

The authors present a literature review concerning the effects of rape on sexual functioning and suggestions for facilitating sexual recovery of rape survivors in counseling.     

Finding Work Following Job Loss: The Role of Coping Resources

The negative physical and psychological effects of job loss are well-documented. Much less research has explored factors that might help people cope with job loss and become reemployed quickly. Individuals who became reemployed within 3 months of job loss were more “internal” in locus of control, had greater self-efficacy, and possessed better problem-solving skills than did individuals who remained unemployed.     

Global Assessment of Relational Functioning Scale (GARF): II. Reliability and Validity in a Sample of Families of Bipolar Patients

The companion article by the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP) Committee on the Family (see p. 155, this issue) describes the development of the Global Assessment of Relational Functioning (GARF) scale. The present study evaluated the reliability and concurrent validity of a manualized version of the GARF in recently episodic bipolar patients (N = 73 ) participating with family members in laboratory interaction tasks. The GARF was applied with high reliability by raters with little clinical experience. GARF ratings discriminated between families rated high and low in expressed emotion, with families rated as high in emotional overinvolvement showing the lowest relational functioning scores. GARF scores also correlated with affective negativity scores derived from the interactional task-based affective style and coping style coding systems. However, relational ratings were independent of levels of concurrent symptoms or illness chronicity among individual patients. GARF ratings may inform the treatment plans for patients with psychiatric disorders, but the optimal methods of data collection and rater training must be determined.     

A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF UPWARD FEEDBACK

This study followed 92 managers during four administrations of an upward feedback program over 2.5 years. Managers' whose initial level of performance (defined as the average rating from subordinates) was low improved between Administrations 1 and 2, and sustained this improvement 2 years later. Most of the performance improvement occurred between the first and second administrations of the program. The observed performance improvement could not be attributed solely to regression to the mean and was unrelated to the number of times, or when, the managers received feedback. Our results suggest that the continued administration of an upward feedback program can result in sustained change over a fairly long period of time and that actually receiving feedback may be less important than the exposure to the valued behaviors. We use control theory and goal setting theory as frameworks for explaining the results and suggesting directions for future research.     

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.     

Results and Possible Implications of the National Board for Certified Counselors Examination

The National Board for Certified Counselors' (NBCC) National Counselor Examination (NCE) has become important in the counseling profession because of its critical role in NBCC's counselor certification process and its increasing use as a state counselor licensure examination. This importance exists in part because implications about and for the counseling profession can be drawn from results of NCE administrations. Data from the six previously administered minimum-criterion score forms of the NCE and some possible implications of those data are presented in this article.     

Intervention for Multipotentiality: Effects of a Career Counseling Laboratory for Gifted High School Students

Career counseling effectively enhanced high school students' desire to engage in discussion about their career development with counselors, parents, and peers. They also were somewhat more likely to plan to go to college. A total of 59% changed or confirmed their career plans.