Empathy for mental health professionals is often inferred from dispositional assessments that misrepresent the temporal, contextual, and multidimensional nature of empathy. This article presents the State-Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a multidimensional assessment of in-session empathy for mental health professionals. Results suggest good…

Dispositions have been identified as critical elements of counselor development and competency. Although there is currently no professional agreement regarding the definition or structure of counselor dispositions, the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP 2016) accreditation standards require counselor…

The purpose of the current study is to validate the Counseling Competencies Scale Revised (CCS-R). We used convenience sampling to recruit counselors and counselors-in-training (N = 156). Specifically, we had 130 female (83.3%) and 26 male (16.7%) participants, and the mean age was 33.16 (SD = 11.18), ranging from 20 to 62 years old. We used…

This quantitative synthesis combines results of 72 studies that published psychometric information for the Multicultural Counseling Inventory. Although internal consistency, subsample means, and intrascale correlations provide promising evidence, convergent correlations with other instrumentation and factor analyses of validity continue to raise…

Empathy has been linked to therapeutic alliance and positive client outcomes. However, the operationalization of empathy varies in definition and measurement, presenting challenges for assessment. This study describes the formulation of the Empathic Counselor Response Scale (ECRS), examines scale properties using Rasch analysis, and considers…

Focused on isolating variables that might be both measurable and essential to effective helping, locating appropriate measures for them, and factor analyzing the variables to determine whether the characteristics were truly independent or could be represented by a smaller number of variables. Subjects (n=99) were helping professionals. Results…

Counselor Rating Form - Short Version (CRF-S) was completed by college students (N=133) who rated their counselors (N=6) after an initial session at a college counseling center. Principal components analysis with direct oblimin rotation of the CRF-S yielded two factors, one composed of attractiveness and trustworthiness items and the other…

Type and comprehensiveness of training were experimentally manipulated (N=128) to study their effects on the reliability and validity of rated counselor empathy. Implications for observer training are discussed. (Author)

This study supported evidence of reliability and validity of the Theoretical Orientation Profile Scale-Revised (TOPS-R) scores. The TOPS-R was designed to measure theoretical orientation among counselors and trainees. Factor analysis yielded a 6-factor solution accounting for 87.5% of the total variance in the scale. The 6 factors corresponded to…

Conducted factor analytic investigation of Counselor Rating Form, Counselor Rating Form-Short Form, and Counselor Effectiveness Rating Scale (CERS) using data from 160 undergraduate students. Analysis revealed two oblique factors (expertness and attractiveness-trustworthiness), whereas CERS produced single, global evaluative factor. Oblique…

Examined psychometric properties, including factor structure, of the Index of Responding and assessed implications of that structure for counseling research. Index of Responding was used as measure of empathy with 70 elementary and secondary teachers enrolled in undergraduate program in guidance counseling. Factor analysis yielded one wide-loading…