Process and Outcome Research

Process Research in Career Counseling

Process inquiry may include both the covert and overt variables of therapists and clients (such as thoughts, feelings, and behaviors) that take place in a counseling session or over the course of several sessions. Process career research has been conducted through the use of two major approaches: naturalistic settings and analogue inquiry. Naturalistic settings are actual counseling sessions with real clients. Forms of naturalistic inquiry include case study (e.g., a detailed focus on one or a few clients to identify process variables), conversational analysis (e.g., analysis of conversation between therapist and client to identify process variables), client's expectations about career counseling, and process variables in group career counseling. Analogue inquiry involves the use of artificially created counseling situations to identify process variables. Analogue research usually involves watching a videotape of a mock session or reading a transcript that resembles an actual counseling session. Most analogue research has focused on counselor variables that may influence the process, such as verbal responses or behavior. Analogue inquiry has examined such variables as counselor verbal responses, counselor in-session behavior, and the process variables in initial interviews. Naturalistic settings allow the researcher to easily generalize findings about the career counseling process, but offer the researcher little control over confounding influences on process variables being measured. While analogue research allows a greater control over the processes being measured, the results are also more difficult to generalize to other individuals outside of the study.

There are four major design decisions that have been identified in the literature that will determine the format of the process research inquiry: (a) what specific processes are being measured, (b) the number of counseling session(s) that will be used to examine the specific processes, (c) the perspective or vantage point from which the specific processes will be measured, and (d) how the gathered data on processes will be evaluated. While there are many processes occurring during a counseling session (e.g., the formation of the working alliance between the counselor and the client), the researcher determines which specific process variables will be focused on and measured, as well as the level on which they will be measured. Examples of focuses of specific processes include content of session(s), what is done in session(s), style of session(s), and quality of the session. This focus may be measured on the microlevel (words stated) to the macrolevel (counseling relationship). For both naturalistic and analogue settings, most process research utilizes trained raters who identify and code the processes of interest taking place in the counseling session(s), thus providing a vantage point of how processes are measured. Traditionally, process data analyses have been correlational, but it is possible to use other forms of statistical analyses.

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