Exploring Therapist Self-Efficacy Change Profiles Using Latent Growth Curve Analysis

Therapist self-efficacy developmental profiles, supervisory working alliance, and client outcome: A growth mixture analysis.

“…The main data analyses composed of three parts. First, we tested the LGCM with the full sample to examine the initial intercepts and growth slopes for the HS, SM, and CH subscales, as was done in Li, Wu, et al (2022). Second, accounting for the individual differences, we utilized the GMM analyses to identify latent classes of therapist trainees who might have different profiles of CSE initial levels and change trends.…”

“…We constructed the same LGCM (Figure 1, Panel a) as in Li, Wu, et al (2022) with the full sample to examine the initial level and growth trend for the HS, SM, and CH subscales of CASES. The latent intercepts of i_HS, i_SM, and i_CH represented the initial level of HS, SM, and CH at T1 (the beginning of the practicum), and the latent slopes of s_HS, s_SM, and s_CH quantified the extent of linear increases from T1 to T2 and T2 to T3 for the three subscales.…”

“…Second, few existing studies explored the potential individual developmental differences across the three domains of CSE over time. As all trainees do not progress uniformly through their professional training process, such “individual difference” research can provide trainers with more nuanced insights about the distinct types of developmental profiles of trainees’ CSE so targeted guidance and support can be provided (Li, Wu, et al, 2022). Third and relatedly, to our knowledge, no research further linked different CSE developmental profiles to important covariates in trainees’ training process (e.g., SWA) and clinical work (e.g., client symptom outcome), which may offer direct evidence on what training factors could be associated with potential distinct types of trainee CSE development, and how these distinct types of trainee CSE development would be associated with important clinical outcome variables such as client symptom relief.…”

“…Unfortunately, in spite of these conceptual distinctions of the three domains of CSE, most existing research either used only the total score representing a sum of all the different domains (e.g., in Lai et al, 2021) or focused only on one or two domains (e.g., Lent et al, 2006). One exception is Li, Wu, et al (2022), in which the authors separately examined how each of the three CSE domains developed over the course of their first practicum for a group of 103 beginning trainees in China. These authors documented that at the beginning of practicum, trainees indeed reported the highest confidence in HS, followed by SM, and with CH the lowest, and all three domains of CSE showed significant improvement during practicum.…”

“…Taken together, building off from the work of Li, Wu, et al (2022), this study had three specific aims. Aim 1 was to explore the overall initial levels and growth profiles of the three domains of CSE in a sample of Chinese beginning trainees as was done in Li, Wu, et al (2022) and to test whether we could replicate their findings. For Aim 2, we sought to further examine the potential subgroups of trainees who might have different patterns of initial levels and incremental changes in the three domains of CSE.…”