Year: 2013
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Rehabilitation counselors experience ethical issues on a daily basis.There are a number of potential influences on the ethical reasoning of certified rehabilitation counselors (CRCs) including external workplace pressures.Professional development efforts in ethics are infused in rehabilitation counseling graduate programs and continuing education in ethics is a requirement to maintain the CRC credential.Little is known, however, about the impact of these interventions on the day-to-day ethical decision-making of CRCs.This study analyzed factors that have been hypothesized to influence the ethical orientations and intuitive, everyday decisions of CRCs.This study had two overreaching goals: (a) to establish the unique contributions of factors that have been predicted to impact principled ethical decision making, and (b) to confirm if the Ethical Decision-Making Scale-Revised (EDMS-R) was a reliable and valid scale for use in the field of rehabilitation counseling.This study of the ethical orientations of CRCs, rather than graduate rehabilitation counseling students, furthered existing research by sampling working counselors across a career wide developmental timeline.No significant relationships were detected between the principle index score dependent variable and measures of formalized ethics education, iv tenure, and exposure to the ethical code.The proposed explanatory model was subsequently rejected.The EDMS-R did show evidence as a reliable and valid tool for use in the rehabilitation counseling field; however, the range of the outcome variable suggested limits on practical use within this population without further modification.Understanding what promotes counselor resistance to maladaptive external factors in ethical decision-making remains an open and important question for the field of rehabilitation counseling.Assessing the impact of educational interventions on counselor ethical decision making remains a high priority for rehabilitation counseling educators.Further exploration toward an understanding of what factors influence the ethical judgments of rehabilitation counselors could help inform how modifiable conditions such as the construction of formalized education interventions are constructed.
Author: Matthew E. Markve
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2463058314