Developing Instruments for Use in Counseling

This article describes the author's experiences and roles in developing four career-oriented measures. The first effort, translating the Ramak into English, proved to be a failure. The second and third efforts, the development of the Career Decision Scale and the Occupational Stress Inventory (OSI), have been more successful. The fourth, the Task Specific Scale of Occupational Self-Efficacy, is still underway, and its usefulness remains to be seen. In sketching these experiences, an attempt is made to show both how proper test development steps are to be followed as well as to indicate that research and development activities can logically grow out of one's personal experience.     

Counseling and the Bystander-Equity Model of Supervisory Helping Behavior: Directions for EAP Research

The proliferation of Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) has created new opportunities for persons in the counseling profession to examine specific psychological, sociological, and environmental factors associated with employee occupational mental health, stress-affected work performance, vocational adjustment, and job-related social behavior. In this article, we discuss the contribution that Bayer and Gerstein's (1988a) Bystander-Equity Model of Supervisory Helping Behavior can make to the pursuit of EAP research based on the traditions of the field of counseling. We also offer the field a structure for pursuing empirical and applied activities in EAP settings. Finally, we encourage counseling researchers and practitioners to respond to the challenge of working much more closely with EAPs, so that our profession can further establish its commitment to investigating various aspects of vocational behavior.     

The Aesthetic Preference: Overcoming the Pragmatic Error

Family therapists share the belief that people simultaneously are parts of a multiplicity of contexts, one of which is the family. The family contexts connect people in patterns as part of the unity of all contexts. Family systems, like all other living systems in nature are structured entities governed by such aesthetic principles as symbolic representation, order, patterning, balance, and unity. Our therapeutic techniques have been created to help transform the various patterns of connections within families, our goal being to help increase the degree of personal and interpersonal flexibility and differentiation for each part of the family system. The family therapist is like the artist searching for a beauty and unity of structure. It is through that aesthetic process that flexibility and differentiation are best furthered. Discovering the nature of the meaningful aesthetic arrangements within family systems is the difference that makes a difference in defining ourselves as family therapists. That difference involves us as part of a paradigmatic movement ( 4 , 20 ) espousing an ecological systems epistemology of mental life.     

Strange Bedfellows?: Rational-Emotive Therapy and Pastoral Counseling

Integrating Rational-Emotive Therapy with biblical precepts is discussed as a basis for pastoral counselors to bridge the gap between religion and psychotherapy.     

THREE FLIES IN THE OINTMENT: A REPLY TO ARVEY AND MOSSHOLDER

Significant legal, practical, and statistical issues regarding the use of the Arvey and Mossholder (1977) procedure for determining similarities and differences among jobs are discussed. On the basis of these issues the authors recommend against using this procedure.