Counselor or change agent: support from the profession

This article supplements the ideas on counseling and the social revolution which appeared in the May 1971 P&G—especially regarding the common behavior models of the counselor and the change agent. Because adherence to a model often places a counselor in jeopardy, the authors call on the profession to offer support and leadership on a national level to those counselors who wish to act as change agents.     

Overcoming Obstacles to the Growth and Development of Guidance and Counseling in Thailand

Suggestions are presented for overcoming traditional customs and governmental problems that are currently obstacles to the growth and development of guidance and counseling in Thailand.     

Marital satisfaction and topographical assessment of marital interaction: A longitudinal analysis of newlywed couples

Despite numerous tests of social learning hypotheses relating to marriage, important questions remain concerning how best to quantify behavior displayed in marital interaction. In the present study, 60 newlywed couples reported their marital satisfaction, engaged in a 15-minute problem-solving discussion, and reported their marital satisfaction again 6 and 12 months later. The interactions were microanalytically coded, the codes were assigned a numeric value, and each spouse's cumulative point totals were plotted as a function of time in the interaction. This was done separately for all 60 couples. Graphs were divided into groups based on the topography of the graphically represented interactions. These groups differed cross-sectionally and longitudinally in their level of marital satisfaction. Couples tended to have lower satisfaction scores when their initial interactions were characterized with behavioral parity between the spouses at the beginning of a discussion, changing to asymmetrical patterns of behavior later in the conversation. This method was found to be more predictive of marital satisfaction than were standard methods of assessing dyadic interaction (i.e., base rates of behavior and sequential analysis). Implications of these data for understanding how interactions relate to the course of newlywed marriage are discussed.