A First Step: Analyzing the Professional Quality of Life of U.S. College Mental Health Counselors
Abstract
The study used a demographic questionnaire and the Professional Quality of Life Scale (ProQOL) to conduct a national survey of mental health counselors (N = 236) working at colleges and universities in the United States. It was hypothesized that U.S. college mental health counselors would indicate higher than average scores on the ProQOL subscales for compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress. The results show that U.S. college mental health counselors indicate average potential for compassion satisfaction and average risk for developing burnout and secondary traumatic stress. It was also hypothesized that counselors’ ProQOL scores would differ between gender, age, and years of work experience groups and interactions among these demographic variables. Analyses using a factorial MANOVA showed that, with one exception, there are no statistically significant scoring differences between or among these demographic variables. The study found that less experienced (< 9 years of work experience) female college mental health counselors scored higher on the secondary traumatic stress subscale than male college mental health counselors with the same range of experience. The results of the study suggest that U.S. college mental health counselors seem resilient in their ability to work in a highly stressful work environment and still derive a sense of occupational or personal satisfaction from doing so. However, in the demographic questionnaire, 64% of college mental health counselors reported that they have considered quitting their job due to work-related stress.
Subject Area
Educational administration|Mental health|Educational leadership
Recommended Citation
Kuroiwa, Jeffrey Yoichi, "A First Step: Analyzing the Professional Quality of Life of U.S. College Mental Health Counselors" (2019). ETD Collection for University of Texas, El Paso. AAI27667206.
https://scholarworks.utep.edu/dissertations/AAI27667206