counselors can do will spread the word of the need for more professionally trained counselors as the community pressures on the schools become more acute. This process can already be seen at work in the increased requests for full-time child guidance workers, both social workers and clinical psychologists, in the schools.It seems to me that the popularity of family therapy, the entphasis on community psychiatry and consultation, are not only a result of an altered therapeutic model of one-to-one relationship as the ideal and only way to be effective, but aIso a greater recognition of both the total forces affecting the individual and the new dimensions of interaction that need to be considered, as well as a very positive statement that change in character of individuals is possible if one understands and utilizes all the dynamically relevant energies available to us.
15administrators, and teachers solve the problems they need to have solved, not the ones on which we choose to work. And survival will not involve vast new manpower demands. Rather, fewer school psychologists, better trained and educated than at present, can have an immensely greater effect in the long run than would more and more school psychologists who operate in a narrowly-defined area in competition with other school service specialties.The term "profession" often is used without definition or else with implicit meanings that are private to the user. However, Vollmer and Mills (1966) suggest that the concept of "profession" be ". . . an abstract model of occupational organization, and the concept of 'professionalization' be used to refer to the dynamic process whereby many occupations can be observed to change certain crucial characteristics in the direction of a 'profession' . . . [pp. vi-vii]." Students of professions have concluded that efforts to determine whether an occupation is a profession are fruitless. An understanding more complete than a simple yes-no determination would contain data on the extent of development of specific characteristics that characterize a particular occupation at a specified point in time. Such data would also provide direction to an occupation in order to enhance these important characteristics of professionalization.Sociologists have delineated several characteristics which arise from the professionalization process that are important to psychology as potent guidelines for future role and function developments.School psychology is an identified subspeciality within psychology. The literature on professionalization, however, deals mainly with generic occupations without regard to specialty differentiation. A subgroup within an occupation has some professionalized characteristics that are developed directly through the process of obtaining general occupational membership, while other characteristics must develop exclusively within the subgroup. This paper is concerned with the discernment of professionalizing characteristics of the total occupation as well as those that permit subgroup distinctions. 11 wish to express my appreciation to my colleagues David Kopel and Robert Tyroler for their helpful comments with regard to the paper.
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.