Qualitative interviews with 15 successful Native American college students who grew up on reservations identified the following themes related to their persistence in college: (a) family support, (b) structured social support, (c) faculty/staff warmth, (d) exposure to college and vocations, (e) developing independence and assertiveness, (f) reliance on spiritual resources, (g) dealing with racism, (h) nonlinear path, and (i) paradoxical cultural pressure. The results indicated a need for stable mentoring relationships and programmatic support.
The authors articulate the need for a Counseling Psychology Model Training Values Statement Addressing Diversity (henceforth “Values Statement”). They discuss the historic unwillingness of the field to address values in a sophisticated or complex way and highlight the increasingly common training scenario in which trainees state that certain professional requirements are in conflict with their personal values. The authors explain that the Values Statement grew out of trainers' expressed need for guidance in dealing with these complex and often emotionally charged value clashes in training. They explain how the Values Statement can assist training programs to (a) clearly articulate the profession's diversity-related values, (b) connect individual and professional values to societal value structures that either reinforce or challenge systems of oppression, and (c) help students to develop the philosophical sophistication to reconcile their personal values and the profession's values. Overall, the authors explicate that the Values Statement is needed to assists trainees to comprehend and perform required diversity-related professional behaviors.
Although distinctions between theory-driven and naive empirical approaches to research are recognized as valuable, the distinction Strong (1991) makes between them is questionable. An argument is made that the more relevant debate is between qualitative and quantitative approaches to counseling research. Some of the differences between the two approaches, as they relate to Strong's ideas, are presented. A proposal is set forth stating that until a more accurate account of events in counseling is achieved, research that is driven by formal theory is of no greater scientific value than less theoretical approaches.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.