Social justice interdependence among students in counseling psychology training programs: Group actor-partner interdependence model of social justice attitudes, training program norms, advocacy intentions, and peer relationships.

Abstract

Counseling psychologists have voiced the importance of nurturing social justice principles in the training of psychologists to better meet diverse people's psychological and social needs. Much of the research on training, however, has been focused on individual factors (e.g., self-efficacy, spirituality). Little empirical evidence exists on the mutual support among students and the role of shared social justice principles in counseling psychology training programs. Thus, we used the group actor-partner interdependence model (GAPIM) to test whether the advocacy intentions of a given student in the program (actor) would be related to the actor's and partner's (other students' aggregate scores in the program) social justice attitudes and perceptions of social justice norms in the training program (social justice norms among students and faculty). Peer relationship was also tested as a moderator of the associations. Structural equation modeling was used to test a series of GAPIMs with data from 178 doctoral students across 19 American Psychological Association accredited counseling psychology Ph.D. programs. Other students' collective attitudes and perceptions of the training program were stronger positive indicators of an individual student's advocacy intentions than actor variables (individual-level attitudes and perceptions). At the individual level, only actor social justice attitudes were significantly related to intentions with very small effect. Peer relationship was a significant moderator such that students in programs with closer peer relationships, who collectively perceived higher social justice norms, reported greater advocacy intentions. Implications for research and training are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).