Resilience Characteristics of Master's-Level Counseling Students
Resilience characteristics typically have been studied among children and adolescents. A new line of research on resilience is focused on exploring the resilience characteristics of adults exposed to short and long-term adversity. In the present study, 585 master's-level counseling students responded to the Resilience Scale (Wagnild & Young, 1993). The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between counseling students' level of resilience and specific background variables (age, gender, marital status, ethnicity, education, income, employment, living situation, sexual orientation, and country of origin), counselor-education program variables (primary field of study, number of credits taken, academic status, professional affiliations, supervision status, counseling courses, role identification, and accreditation), and risk (poverty, natural disasters, and terrorism) and protective variables (perceived support, school expectations, and community involvement). The results of this study indicated that resilience characteristics and the overall resilience score were associated with background variables, risk and protective variables, and counselingtraining- program variables. The counseling-training-program variables examined were minimally correlated with participants' resilience characteristics or their resilience score. The results of this study offer support for the adoption of wellness-based assessments of counseling trainees, as opposed to measures of impairment. Suggestions are offered for counselor educators and supervisors regarding possibilities for fostering the resilience of counseling trainees as well as counseling practitioners.
resilience, protective factors, risk factors, counseling, counseling training, wellness
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