This analogue study examines the interaction between precounseling information, religiosity, and problem type and its subsequent effect on counselor ratings of social influence and willingness to seek help. Using an inventory of Christian beliefs, the authors assess college students' religiosity. After providing a presenting problem and reading a description of a secular (nonreligious), religious-empathic, or Christian counselor, par ticipants responded to the Counselor Rating Form-Short and Willingness to Seek Help scale. Based on an Aptitude × Treatment interaction design using hierarchical multiple regression, the interactions between participant religiosity and counselor description, as well as participant religiosity, counselor description, and participant problem type, were predictive of counselor social influence and willingness to seek help ratings only with respect to the Christian counselor description. Implications of these results for research and practice are discussed.

Variance in observational ratings of the Interpersonal Communications Rating Scale (ICRS; Strong & Hills, 1986) attributable to individual raters and mode of presentation (i.e., videotape, audiotape, transcript, videotape plus transcript, and audiotape plus transcript) was examined. Nine raters used the ICRS to code the three Gloria and the three Richard films for which the presentation mode was systematically varied. With respect to intrarater reliability across presentation mode, the transcript-only mode was found to have lower reliability with other presentation modes. Generalizability analyses revealed that some methods of aggregating the ICRS ratings into complementarity scores were more generalizable than others. Results are discussed with respect both to using the ICRS specifically and to more general issues of observational rating reliability and validity.

Stone and Archer, in a prominent article, identified a variety of challenges that college and university counseling centers would face in the 1990s. They offered 43 recommendations, grouped by six counseling center functions, that centers could adopt to meet the challenges. Sixty-seven counseling center directors completed a survey designed to assess the extent to which Stone and Archer’s recommendations had been heeded in the 5-year period from 1990-1991 to 1995-1996. Significant positive increases ( p < .001) in adherence were obtained for 23 recommendations (53.5%) with some change found in each one of the six counseling center functions. The survey results suggest that counseling centers actively responded to the many challenges they encountered in the first half of the decade.