Abstract :
This study was conducted to investigate the effect of microcounseling (MC) on counseling skills of counselor trainees. The design of this study was a randomized pretest-posttest comparison (control) group experimental analogue design. Forty-one third year undergraduate counselor trainees were randomly assigned to both an experimental group and a control group as subjects of the study. Twenty-one subjects in the experimental group received MC training and twenty subjects in the control group received a traditional training (TT) regarding basic counseling skills (attending behavior, questioning, minimal encouragement, reflection of content, reflection of feeling and summarization) by a female faculty member. At pretest, all subjects were randomly assigned to one of the eight standard clients and conducted a ten-minute interview with the client. At posttest, the subjects conducted another ten-minute interview with the same client. Three female judges, doctoral students in counseling, rated the effectiveness of the subjects’ responses in the videotaped interviews. It was hypothesized that MC would increase the trainees’ effectiveness in the use of basic counseling skills significantly more than TT but the results did not confirm the hypothesis. The results indicated that MC and TT were equally effective in increasing the trainees’ effectiveness in the use of basic counseling skills. However, there was some evidence that MC has more potential than TT to improve trainees.
NaturalLanguageKeyword :
counselor training , counseling skills , Microcounseling , traditional training , analogue research
