With the nationwide concern for accountability in education, the elementary school counselor is often the center of controversy. What is the role of the elementary counselor? How does he define is role and how does his administrators define it? Is there a difference between his view of his actual functions and those he feels he should perform and does his view differ from that of administrators and counselor educators? How relevant are current educational and certification requirements? An approach to answering these questions is to survey the groups involved to discover their attitudes toward and views of the elementary guidance counselor’s role. Methodology A study of views of the elementary counselor’s role was undertaken in the state of Massachusetts. Three hundred and forty-three (343) elementary school counselors, guidance directors, elementary school principals, superintendents and counselor educators were randomly selected to take part in the survey. A 3-part questionnaire, employing Likert-type scales, Semantic Differential scales and open-ended questions, and dealing with various role functions, education, certification and counselor image, was sent to the total sample. Groups' responses were analyzed and compared by means of the Mann-Whitney U Test, the Friedman Two-Way Analysis of Variance, the F test of variance, the arithmetic mean and the standard deviation. Results and Discussion. Significant differences were found both between and within all five groups in their views of the actual counselor role functions and the ideal functions. There was also much disagreement on certification and education requirements. There was no significant difference in their opinions of the counselor role image, however, nor of their rank ordering of groups serviced by the counselor. Counselor educators were found to be most at variance with the counselors' views in all areas of the questionnaire while directors and counselors most frequently agreed. The investigation supported the hypothesis that there is a dichotomy between the perceived and actual roles of the elementary counselor as seen by counselors, administrators and counselor educators and provides evidence that the present controversy about the elementary. Guidance counselor's role is prompted by a failure to agree on and thus define the elementary counselor's role functions, inadequate educational preparation and irrelevant certification laws. Implications. The study revealed that all groups presently stress the remedial functions of the counselor although they recognize developmental guidance as an ideal goal. Essentially, however, the actual roles were not seen as very different from the ideal. One need is for counselor educators to work more closely with the schools and to gain a more realistic view of the problems of the counselor. Counselors also need to work together through a state-wide elementary counselor organization to effect changes in elementary counselor education and certification requirements. Unless elementary counselors become actively involved in defining their role and making that definition known to others, elementary counseling will continue to be of decreasing importance in the State instead of becoming a strong complement of education with the aim of enhancing the total wellbeing and growth of all children.

The Illness Perception Questionnaire - Revised (IPQ - R; Moss-Morris, Weinman, Petrie, Horne, Cameron, & Buick, 2002) was utilized in the current research to better understand and predict fluid adherance in hemodialysis patients. A sample of patients was recruited from three hemodialysis centers in the Los Angeles area and 116 participants completed the Illness Perception Questionnaire - Revised.

This study is designed to more fully understand the adaptational processes that parents of lesbians and gay men experience when their children come out to them. Seventeen parents described their experiences in semi-structured interviews. The interview transcripts were analyzed using grounded theory methodology to develop a model of parental adjustment over time. Parents experienced three broad phases of adjustment, each with different emphases: emotional responses were most dominant initially, cognitive and behavioral adjustments were the primary focus of the middle phase, and moral/spiritual issues were the major concern of the final phase. Some parents who successfully negotiated these adjustments came to view being the parent of a gay male or lesbian as an important component of their identities. Implications for further research and clinical practice are discussed.

Over the past decade, cyber-sexual assault (also known as "nonconsensual pornography" or "revenge porn") has gained the attention of legal experts, the media, and most recently, the counseling profession. Whereas this nonconsensual sharing of sexually explicit images online, through social medial, or other forms of technology has been demonstrated to have significant impacts on victims, researchers have focused heavily upon the legality of these actions (i.e. should there be consequences for posting nude/semi-nude photos of non-consenting adults to the internet), but there has been a lack of attention to the mental health consequences of cyber-sexual assault on victims. The purpose of this study was to provide empirical support to how the psychological aftermath of cyber-sexual assault mirrors that of sexual assault and thus should be taken as seriously as sexual assault (clinically and legally). This study was conducted to investigate the direction and strength of relationships among latent variables associated with trauma symptomology (i.e., emotional dysregulation, trauma guilt, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression) in a sample of survivors of cyber-sexual assault. This investigation specifically tested whether modeling latent variables emotional dysregulation as measured by the Brief Version of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale [DERS-16] (Bjureberg et al., 2015) or trauma guilt as measured by the Trauma-Related Guilt Inventory [TRGI] (Kubany et al., 1996) as the independent variable, where the remaining latent variables of post-traumatic stress disorder as measured by the Impact of Events Scale Revised [IES-R] (Weiss & Marmar, 1996) and depression as measured by the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale Revised [CESD-R] (Eaton et al., 2004) were modeled as dependent variables, was a good fit for data collected from cyber-sexual assault survivors. Furthermore, the secondary analysis investigated whether modeling the latent variables of emotional dysregulation and trauma guilt as mediating variables on the direction and strength of relationship on the dependent variables of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression was a good fit for data collected from cyber-sexual assault survivors. To test the hypotheses that cyber-sexual assault survivors would show increased trauma symptomology similar to physical sexual assault survivors a structural equation model was developed. The results of the structural equation model (SEM) analyses identified trauma guilt contributed to 14% of the variance of emotional dysregulation; which then served to mediate the outcome variables most significantly. In fact, Emotional Dysregulation contributed to 67% of the variance in the levels of PTSD symptomology, and 44% of the variance in the levels of Depression.

An important part of becoming a counselor is developing strong counselor competence, particularly for counselors-in-training. Thus, the main goal in counselor education is to develop students' competence to be capable to practice as a professional counselor. Assessing the competence of counselors-in-training remains the primary focus in counselor education and supervision (Bernard & Goodyear, 2014; McAuliffe & Eriksen, 2011; Swank & Lambie, 2012). There have been various attempts to measure the true construct of counselor competence (e.g., Hughes, 2014; Swank, Lambie, & Witta, 2012; Urbani, Smith et al., 2002). Those attempts tried to involve diverse voices around counselor competence in more comprehensive ways. Although there are numerous measures assessing supervisor ratings of counselor competence, there is still a lack of clients' voice in assessing counselor competence and performance in counselor education literature. In particular, there has been a deficit of direct measures to assess counselor competence by clients (Tate et al., 2014). Therefore, a new client-rated scale of counselor competence is required to provide invaluable information for enhancing a counselor's own professional competence as well as the quality of counselor preparation programs. The purpose of this study is to assess the psychometric properties using a Rasch model on a newly developed client-rated scale of counselor competence, named Client Ratings of Counselor Competence (CRCC). For this purpose of this study, the CRCC was developed, following the procedures for a scale development that the Rasch measurement model proposed. The development process consisted of (a) defining hierarchical attributes of what to measure, (b) generating a pool of items corresponding to the defined attributes, (c) determining the scale-type of measurement, (d) expert reviewing, (f) conducting a field test to a research sample, (g) evaluating the items using Rasch analysis, and (h) determining the final scale. Specifically, the initial pool of 85 items was generated and reduced to 36 items through expert review and a pilot test. The participants in this study were 84 adult clients who received counseling service from counselor trainees in a community counseling center. This study investigated diverse aspects of validity in the 36-item CRCC using the Rasch model, following the guideline by Wolfe and Smith (2007). In specific, content evidence, substantive evidence, structural evidence, generalizability, and interpretability evidence were investigated with the results of the Rasch analysis. The result showed that negatively worded items were commonly misfitted to the model. The rating scale analysis result showed that a 3-point rating scale format could be more appropriate than the current 4-point scale. In addition, the investigation of item difficulty hierarchy perceived by clients were mostly consistent with the assumed hierarchical structure in the test specification, empirically supporting microskills hierarchy (Ivey et al., 2013). The dimensionality analysis result showed the presence of possible additional dimension in the current CRCC. The reliability level of CRCC was acceptable as well as some bad items functioning differently across gender were detected with the DIF analysis. Additionally, the practicum level counselors-in-training in this study showed higher level of competence above the level that the current CRCC items could measure. Lastly, implications of the study, limitations, and future research were discussed. Some implications of the findings include: (a) the use of the Rasch model to assess the psychometric properties of the CRCC scale can make the developing instrument more valid and reliable, overcoming the major weakness of the classical test theory; (b) item difficulty level in the Rasch analysis can be a useful tool to empirically demonstrate whether a theoretical concept or model, especially with hierarchical or developmental structure, exists with real data; (c) the item-person map in the Rasch model can provide useful information for evaluating the instruments as well as interpreting the test scores; and (d) after more revisions and further validation studies, the CRCC could be utilized as additional assessment when counselor educators want to assess whether the trainees develop the competence above the expected level, especially from clients' perspective.

An attempt will be made to answer these questions: (1) Why is a guidance program necessary? (2) What steps are being taken to accomplish the objectives set forth? (3) What is considered the best method of instituting a guidance program? In answering these questions a study of the guidance programs in a few of the leading cities and states of the United States has been taken into consideration. The best possible method or combination of methods will be recommended. This method will be compared with the program of guidance now in operation in the Waco High School, Waco, Texas.

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