Development of the Attitudes Toward Career Counseling Scale.

Abstract

This article reports on 5 studies that addressed the development and validation of a measure of attitudes toward career counseling. Factor analyses of the Attitudes Toward Career Counseling Scale (ATCCS) yielded 2 factors that measured perceived value and stigma related to career counseling. Internal consistency estimates and test-retest reliability estimates across studies were moderate to high. As evidence of convergent validity, the Value and Stigma scales correlated in the expected directions with general help-seeking attitudes, decision-making styles, satisfaction with a career exploration course, and intentions of seeking help for different psychological problems including career counseling. A discussion of how this scale adds to the help-seeking literature and suggestions for future research are provided.