Date

5-22-2024

Department

School of Behavioral Sciences

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in Counselor Education and Supervision (PhD)

Chair

Lynn Bohecker

Keywords

Qualitative Research, Professional Identity, Conflict Theory, Grounded Theory, Situational Analysis

Disciplines

Counseling | Educational Leadership

Abstract

Using Charmaz’s (2014) grounded theory (GT) and Clarke’s (2003; 2005; Clarke et al., 2018) situational analysis (SA), this study explores the experience of counselor educators and their pressure to conform throughout their professional identity development process. As counselor educators, these individuals are thought and practice leaders in the field of professional counseling, training up future counselors and advancing the field in scholarship and advocacy as a social science (Aubrey, 1980; Hansen et al., 2014). As a social science, the integrity and investigative power of counseling are tethered to empirical discovery through quantitative and qualitative methods and philosophy – while inherently complementary, these two modes of inquiry, and their respective philosophies, have been set at odds in the course of development within the social sciences. This tension has been referred to as the “paradigmatic pendulum” (Hansen, 2009), wherein the social sciences swing back and forth throughout the eras from “medicalized, material models of care to psychological, immaterial approach to human change” (Hansen et al., 2014, p. 117). Representing the core of our profession, the swinging of this pendulum often goes undiscussed by counselor educators, and thus without understanding of its implications on professional identity in counselor education. Interpreted through conflict theory and post-structuralism, the participants were guided through three iterative interviews to uncover the meaning they find in the qualitative world of discovery, and their place in it, as they embody their own understanding of professional identity in counselor education.

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