The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of client choice of a counselor on the subsequent counseling relationship. Existential and humanistic theory and practice were the theoretical and practical concepts upon which this study was based reflecting the concepts of Rogers, Barrett-Lennard, Carkhuff, Truax, and Berenson.The research was conducted at the Ball State University, Wiesbaden, Germany, European Branch. The population consisted of clients and counselors. The clients were 16 volunteers from the Masters Degree program with a major in counseling and the counselors were enrolled in either the Specialist of Education or the Doctor of Education degree program offered by Ball State University in Europe for the American military and civilian community stationed in the European area. The client population was divided into treatment and control groups. The treatment consisted of having both groups watch a video tape of the eight counselors being interviewed by the same interviewer and using a standard interview format. At the conclusion of the viewing of the video tape each treatment client was asked to pick the counselor that he/she wished to have as a counselor. The control group was randomly assigned counselors after they viewed the video tape. A one hour counseling interview was then held with each client. At the end of the hour each client and counselor was asked to complete the Barrett-Lennard Relationship inventory. An audio tape was made of each interview from which a master tape was made.The Barrett-Lennard Relationship Inventories were then scored in order to determine the clients and counselors perception of the quality of the counseling relationship that had been established. The master tape consisted of uniformly selected segments from each audio tape. Each audio tape had extracted from it three three-minute segments. This master tape was then rated by trained raters who had a previously established interrater reliability of .81.The data thus generated from the Barrett-Lennard Relationship Inventory and the rating of the tapes was then subjected to statistical analysis. The means of the client scores were analysed by using the t test for independent samples. No significance was found when the means of the treatment and control groups were compared. The means of the raters: rating the treatment and control groups were treated by using the paired t test. Significance at the .05 level was found. The means of counselor scores were analysed by using the t test for the difference between correlated means. No significance was found.Conclusions based on the findings indicated that the raters, counselors, and clients were probably using different criteria in evaluating the quality of the counseling relationship established as a result of the experiment. This conclusion is based on the fact that no significance was found between counselor and client means and significance was found between the means of the raters rating the quality of the counseling interaction between treatment and control groups. Specifically hypothesis one and hypotheses one-a through one-d showed no significance. Hypothesis two was significant at the .05 level. Hypothesis three and sub hypotheses three-a through three-d showed no significance.The conflicting nature of the evidence gained as a result of this experiment encourages further research concerning client choice of counselor in order that more conclusive evidence in support or non-support of the hypotheses of this study may be obtained. Until this variable of choice is more completely researched with a more general experimental population nothing in support or non-support of the basic assumption of the study can be made. At the present time this whole area of client-counselor pairing remains open as a possibility for increasing the quality of the counseling relationship.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/175256 |
| Date | January 1977 |
| Creators | Brown, Jack Ellis |
| Contributors | Krause, Frank H. |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | vii, 95, [2] leaves ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
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