Developmental Characteristics of Home-Based Counselors: A Key to Serving At-Risk Families

Abstract

Home-based counseling is an incredibly demanding intervention, yet little is known about the counselors providing this important service. This study sought to profile ego development, conceptual complexity, and supervision satisfaction for 120 home-based counselors. Counselors scored at moderate levels on measures of both ego development and conceptual level. Most counselors (74.2%) reported dissatisfaction with supervision because they are “undersupervised.” Implications for using a cognitive developmental framework for training and supervising home-based counselors are discussed.

Common Components of Home-Based Family Therapy Models: The HBFT Partnership in Kansas

“…The increasing difficulty and intensity of working with families in their home requires the clinician to develop specialized skills. Lawson and Foster (2005) suggest that "In situations such as home-based counseling, where the treatment environment is unstructured, the counselor must be functioning at a higher conceptual level for the counseling interactions to be effective" (p.155). When those skills are absent or underdeveloped there is a potential to undermine HBFT treatment effectiveness and reify a family's negative perceptions concerning the value and efficacy of therapy (Cortes 2004;Lawson and Foster 2005).…”

“…A therapist's ability to guide treatment while navigating through the unique challenges of HBFT requires specialized skills that are often missing from graduate training programs (Cortes 2004;Lawson and Foster 2005). Those skills include: deliberate and integrated use of the home environment in developing goals and interventions; adapting treatment to involve children, adults, and the whole family system; managing proper professional boundaries that honor the distinctions among family member and clinician roles and responsibilities; effectively transforming the "home visit" into therapeutic work; and matching services to the family needs.…”

Home-Based Therapy for Young Children in Low-Income Families: A Student Training Program

“…When reviewing the literature regarding counselors' experiences doing in-home therapy, four themes emerged: (a) doing in-home therapy was especially challenging and demanding (Christensen, 1995;Lawson & Foster, 2005;Snyder & McCollum, 1999); (b) counselors trained to do clinic-or school-based therapy often felt ineffective and unprepared to do in-home therapy (Christensen, 1995;Snyder & McCollum, 1999); (c) rigorous and specialized training was recommended to equip counselors for the unique challenges of in-accessed by following the link in the citation at the bottom of the page.…”

“…The author acknowledged the difficulty of providing inhome therapy and suggested that specialized training should be provided to supervisors and to therapists to address the unique issues that may arise in such an environment. Lawson and Foster (2005) conducted a study investigating the ego development, the conceptual complexity, and the supervisor satisfaction of 120 home-based counselors. The authors found that the nature of home-based therapy (e.g., highly unstructured environments, numerous and simultaneous cognitive and interpersonal strains) demanded more in terms of ego and conceptual development from counselors in a home setting than from counselors in a clinic-or a school-based setting.…”

“…home therapy (Christensen, 1995;Cortes, 2004;Lawson & Foster, 2005); and (d) regular supervision can positively affect a counselor's experience in a home-based setting (Lawson & Foster, 2005). Yet, despite a clear call for specialized training programs that have consistent and high-quality supervision, the current literature contains no clear description of what such a program might look like (Cortes, 2004).…”