Employment and Roles of Counselors in Mental Health Agencies

The authors studied the employment of counselors with master's degrees in multiservice mental health agencies. The study focused on the types of clients seen, the direct care services provided, and the administrative duties performed. Results suggested that the employment of counselors does not differ significantly from the employment of individuals with master's degrees in psychology and social work. Also, the data indicated that counselors are delivering direct care services that traditionally have been offered in mental health centers, that clients seen by counselors demonstrate a range of mental disorders, and that counselors are responsible for fulfilling various administrative duties.     

TO LEAD, LAG, OR MATCH: ESTIMATING THE FINANCIAL IMPACT OF PAY LEVEL POLICIES

In this study, the Boudreau and Berger (1985a) retention/acquisition model is modified in order to develop a utility model that can be used to assess the impact of alternative pay level policies. This paper then demonstrates how the model could be used to assess the financial impact of alternative pay level policies for an organization whose current policy is to match the market. In demonstrating this, estimates of the effect of pay level on employee and applicant behaviors are presented. The utility model is then used to translate these effects into financial terms and compare them against the wage costs associated with alternative pay level policies. Finally, break-even analysis is used to suggest how decision makers might use utility results when making decisions about pay level policy. The implications for pay level policy and the role of utility analysis in compensation decision making are discussed.     

Counseling's Inescapable Moral Visions

In this article, philosophical hermeneutics is combined with interpretive social science perspectives to generate a framework for considering the influence of cultural values and assumptions on counseling theory and practice. The core of this framework is the claim that people necessarily live within moral visions that answer the questions: (a) what is a person? and (b) what should a person be or become? Culture provides answers to these questions not only through folk and indigenous psychologies but also by shaping psychological and counseling theories. Moral visions are generally unacknowledged because of the fact-value dualism and the ideals of neutrality that pervade Western culture. Consequently, moral visions, like individualism, operate as disguised ideology in counseling theory and practice.     

Attachment styles and other predictors of relationship satisfaction in dating couples

A sample of 186 dating couples completed questionnaires in order to examine the relevance of attachment styles, romantic beliefs, self-esteem, and gender roles to relationship satisfaction. The aim was to assess whether male and female anxiety over abandonment and comfort with closeness, and interactions among them, predicted satisfaction beyond the contribution of the other variables. Using multiple-regression analysis, it was found that attachment styles successfully predicted satisfaction, after controlling for romantic beliers, self-esteem, and gender roles. Both partners were particularly dissatisfied when either partner suffered high anxiety over abandonment or low comfort with closeness. Implications for gender roles, relationship satisfaction, and attachment styles are discussed.     

Assessing therapeutic problem solving skills: Empirical analysis of a measuring operation

Employment of caregivers as trainers is an imperative in the training and treatment of mentally retarded persons. Besides being taught specific behavior modification skills, these paraprofessional trainers have to obtain a set of general skills in order to adjust their specific skills to new clients, situations, and behaviors across time. Empirical research on the characteristics of therapeutic problem-solving skills are scarce. This may be due to a reluctance of behavior researchers against including cognitive factors in the analysis of behavior influence. However, the development of basic knowledge on the existence of therapeutic problem-solving skills should be one of the primary research goals. This article describes the development and application of four scales assumed to be representative of an important set of general skills—therapeutic problem-solving skills. By means of these four scales 21 caregivers were evaluated before and after extensive training. A multifaceted measuring operation is employed with the main objective of empirically testing the dimensionality of problem-solving skills. Rater consistency and individual differences in change from pre- to post-training level are also uncovered. It is concluded that the four scales of therapeutic skills, largely reflect the same underlying concept of a rather general therapeutic problem-solving skill. Discussion of the findings also pointed to future research.     

RELIABILITIES OF RATINGS AVAILABLE FROM THE DICTIONARY OF OCCUPATIONAL TITLES

Job analysts who collect occupational information for the Dictionary of Occupational Titles observed and interviewed job incumbents representing 20 diverse occupations and rated each occupation on a wide variety of characteristics following standard United States Employment Services procedures. On the basis of four ratings, the large majority of 70 scales were found to have coefficient alpha (or KR-20) reliabilities in excess of .SO, and 25 scales had reliabilities ranging from .90 to .98; a variance ratio procedure yielded largely consistent estimates. Reliabilities were similar to those found in an earlier study using different procedures and were similar to those from a well-developed, occupa-tionally anchored scale of "Job Complexity," developed for this study. Scales representing broad, abstract job characteristics tended to have higher reliabilities than scales representing more concrete job characteristics.     

The Effect of Several Self-Disclosure Permutations on Counseling Process and Outcome

Sixty male college seniors with deficient job-interviewing skills were randomly assigned to one of five cells in a 2 × 2 + 1 design. The presence or absence of two kinds of counselor self-disclosures was crossed and embedded in a standard interview skills-training program. The standard program and an additional no-treatment cell served as control conditions. Four different counselors treating participants on an individual basis provided predetermined, genuine self-disclosures at different points in the interviews. Their self-disclosures reflected the qualities of intimacy and/or skill display. Comparisons between the existential and coping-mastery model literatures were drawn. The supposition that counselor self-disclosures lead to improvements in counseling process and outcome was not supported.