Counselling effectiveness of guidance officers in Queensland State high schools

Abstract

The counselling effectiveness of guidance officers (GOs) was examined in a study involving 21 State secondary schools in Queensland. Students from Year 8 to Year 12 from each school were asked to rate the level of satisfaction with a counselling session. This was measured by the Client Satisfaction Questionnaire (CSQ) developed by Larsen, Attkisson, Hargreaves and Nguyen (1979). Based on Strong's (1968) Social Influence model, counselling was assumed to be an interpersonal influence process. Therefore these students also rated their perceptions of a GO's counselling attributes on the Counselor Rating Form – Short Version (CRF-S; Corrigan & Schmidt, 1983). Results indicated that ratings on the 12 CRF-S items as a total as well as a number of individual items significantly predicted CSQ scores. Student ratings on both questionnaires were high and possible explanations are considered. Also, several GO and student variables (e.g. sex of student, willingness, year level) were found to significantly predict satisfaction. Additionally, a number of these GO and student variables (e.g. GO and sex of student, willingness, the number of counselling sessions) were also found to differentially affect students' perceptions of GOs' counselling attributes.