Date of Award

2019-01-01

Degree Name

Ed.D.

Department

Educational Leadership and Administration

Advisor(s)

Eduardo . Arellano

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.

Keywords: college mental health counselors, professional quality of life, compassion satisfaction, compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

190 pages

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Jeffrey Yoichi Kuroiwa

Download

Share

COinS