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Self‐Description and Preference for Various Educational Specialties Among Counselor Trainees
Author(s) -
Pearson Richard E.
Publication year - 1971
Publication title -
counselor education and supervision
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.608
H-Index - 40
eISSN - 1556-6978
pISSN - 0011-0035
DOI - 10.1002/j.1556-6978.1971.tb01436.x
Subject(s) - preference , specialty , psychology , semantic differential , medical education , similarity (geometry) , counselor education , clinical psychology , social psychology , higher education , medicine , psychiatry , computer science , artificial intelligence , political science , law , economics , image (mathematics) , microeconomics
The study investigated differences in self‐description (obtained by using the Osgood Semantic Differential Technique) between counselor‐trainees indicating first occupational preference for counseling and those indicating preference for an educational specialty other than counseling (i.e., teaching, administration, school psychology). In addition, these two groups were compared in terms of the degree of similarity between their individual self descriptions and their descriptions of each of the specialty groups. No differences were found between the counseling preferred and the noncounseling preferred groups in their self‐descriptions (as expressed in terms of three factors: evaluation, potency, activity). However, it was found that the counseling‐preferred group described themselves significantly more similar to the way in which they described counselors than did the noncounseling specialty preferred group. In fact, in terms of magnitude of difference between self‐description and descriptions of the various specialists, the non‐counseling specialty preferred group describes itself as resembling counselors least. Implications for further research were discussed.