The influence of anxiety in supervision toward trainee counselors’ competencies in Malaysia

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the association between anxiety and counseling competencies among Malaysian trainee counselors within supervision. Recently, counseling competencies have been highlighted in counselor education and training as it is one of the professional ethics to be obliged. However, there were a limited number of studies on how anxiety was affecting the competencies of counselors-in-training. Previous literature shows that most of the studies regarding this topic have been conducted more in Western countries than in Malaysia. Therefore, this study was implemented in public universities that offer bachelor counseling programs all across Malaysia. The respondents comprising n=204 final year trainee counselors undergo internship and n=62 counseling lecturers are supervisors. The result proves that anxiety has a negative significant correlation with counselor trainees’ competencies r=-.399**. The result indicated that the anxiety in the model was a significant predictor of counseling competencies, R2=.159, F (1, 202)=38.180**, p<.000. The results also reported that anxiety had contributed significantly (β=-.285**, p<.000) on the Malaysian novice counselors’ competency. This study provided supervisors and counselor educators with empirical data on the factor that may affect trainee counselors’ competencies during the training. In contrast, this study only focuses on anxiety. There might be other factors that need to be considered in future studies. All these findings bring new perspectives in response to issues regarding trainee counselors to enable them to grow and remain responsive and beneficial to the educational needs of novice counselors.