Informed Consent Documents of Marriage and Family Therapists in Private Practice: A Qualitative Analysis

This article describes a study involving informed consent documents (ICDs) of family therapists in private practice. Therapists' documents were obtained via email solicitation and analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Seven conceptual categories were developed and are summarized. Findings suggest that there were both substantial consistency in the major areas of the documents but variance in their more detailed aspects. The latter was viewed as indicative of the subjectivity involved in creating ICDs and suggests that developing a universal document could be nearly impossible. Stylistic differences were also examined in relation to how they may reflect personal aspects of the therapists.     

Relationships Among Dogmatism,Family Ideology,and Religiosity in Master's-Level Counseling Students

This paper presents the results of a survey of the perceptions of master's-level counseling students in the areas of dogmatism, family ideology, and religiosity. Participants in the study consisted of 331 master's-level counseling students from 7 master's-level counselor education programs in northern, southern, and eastern regions of the United States. A total of 142 participants were classified as beginning participants, and 123 were classified as graduating participants. Findings indicated that graduating participants were significantly lower in levels of dogmatism than were beginning participants. Bivariate and multivariate data analyses also revealed that family ideology was more strongly related to dogmatism than religiosity.     

IMPLICATIONS OF THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL NATURE OF JOB PERFORMANCE FOR THE VALIDITY OF SELECTION TESTS: MULTIVARIATE FRAMEWORKS FOR STUDYING TEST VALIDITY

Although most studies of criterion-related validity focus on univariate relationships, the complex and multidimensional nature of the performance construct and the widespread use of multiple selection devices argue in favor of multivariate frameworks for evaluating validity. Using a Monte Carlo simulation we estimated the validity of general cognitive ability tests and personality tests in predicting "job performance," where performance is conceptualized as a composite of multiple performance measures (i.e., individual job task performance and organizational citizenship behaviors). The validity of a selection battery varies substantially as a function of the relative weight given to both predictors and criteria; the 95% confidence interval for validities ranged from .20 to .78. The effective weights given to performance dimensions accounted for 34% of the variance in selection battery validities; depending on precisely how "performance" is defined, the same test battery can have relatively high or relatively low levels of validity. Our model suggests that the way an organization defines job performance is a source of true and important variability in validities, and that the validity of selection tests for predicting complex performance criteria may show considerably less generalizability that current metaanalysis of univariate validities would suggest.