Abstract
Counselors vary in personality traits, worldviews, epistemic values, cognitive styles, and developmental influences, and these variations in return effect their choice of a guiding theory. This study addresses the variables associated with the theoretical orientations of Turkish psychological counseling students. Participants completed measures of curiosity, thinking styles, epistemological beliefs and a questionnaire on their theoretical choices. Three separate discriminant analysis were conducted to understand which variables differentiate between theoretical orientations. Results of the discriminant analysis revealed that conservative and liberal thinking styles and absorption dimension of curiosity differentiated between theoretical orientations.
Highlights
The term theoretical orientation refers to a set of assumptions, providing a framework to the counselor for formulating hypotheses about a client’s experience, creating specific treatment interventions, and looking over the evolving therapeutic process (Poznanski & McLennan, 1995)
Counselors vary in personality traits, worldviews, epistemic values, cognitive styles, and developmental influences (Conway, 1988; Zachar & Leong, 1992) and these variations in return effect their choice of a guiding theory
The findings regarding the theoretical orientations of the students revealed that 42% of the participants chose Cognitive/Cognitive Behavioral approach (N = 65), 30% of them chose Humanistic/Existential approach (N = 46) and 28% chose Solution Focused approach (N = 43) as their major theoretical orientations
Summary
The term theoretical orientation refers to a set of assumptions, providing a framework to the counselor for formulating hypotheses about a client’s experience, creating specific treatment interventions, and looking over the evolving therapeutic process (Poznanski & McLennan, 1995). Therapists with rational epistemic commitments are primarily characterized by their belief in a-priori truths (Mahoney, Lyddon, & Alford, 1989) Given these results, in this study behavioral and psychodynamic approaches are expected to be associated with epistemological rigidity, while cognitive, humanistic, existential and solution focused approaches are expected to be associated with epistemological flexibility. Studying factors effecting theoretical choice among Turkish counseling students may provide valuable information on values and assumptions of student counselors with diverse orientations, and contribute to our understanding of their theoretical decision making process. Current study aims to examine theoretical choices of counseling students and to understand the roles of epistemological beliefs, thinking styles and curiosity in discriminating between theoretical orientations
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