Studying the vocational counseling process: A preliminary examination

In this study, we examined the effects of counselor empathic and coping/mastery self-disclosure statements on clients' impressions of an initial vocational counseling interview. A primary purpose of our study was to reconsider one aspect of the investigation of Watkins et al(1990), in which the counselor responses of self-disclosure, self-involvement, empathy and open question were found to have no differential effects on clients' impressions of vocational counseling. Even though we attempted to provide a more specific test of empathy versus self-disclosure responses, we for the most part also obtained a general lack of significance on the dependent variables. In conjunction with Watkins et al.'s findings, we provide some discussion of our results, and their potential meanings for vocational counseling and future vocational counseling research.