Because of demographic changes and the prioritization of Medicare reimbursement, there is greater attention to the mental health needs of older adults. To better understand the current state of gerontological counseling research, the authors completed a content analysis of counseling scholarship spanning 26 years. Only 1.68% of the articles reviewed focused on topics related to gerontological counseling. The authors analyzed publishing patterns, topics explored, and the roles of theory and empirical research in gerontological counseling research.
Practicing mental health counselors and counselors‐in‐training (N = 251) were given a measure of tolerance toward people with schizophrenia. Half of the sample received a version that used the term “schizophrenic” and half received a version that used “person with schizophrenia.” Counselors and those in training who received the version with the term “schizophrenic” had attitudes that were more authoritarian, more socially restrictive, and less benevolent. Practicing counselors and counseling students were both affected by terminology, although there were greater differences in tolerance based on language for practicing counselors. The results of this study provide the first empirical evidence for the elimination of the term “schizophrenic” from clinical practice.
Using quantitative content analysis, we categorized 76 out of 154 articles (49.35%) published in Adultspan Journal from 1999 to 2019 as focused on gerontological counseling. This study explored publication trends for these articles and compared results with a larger study (Fullen et al., 2019) on publication trends for gerontological counseling across all counseling‐related journals.
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