The Effective Counselor and the Disadvantaged Student

Previous research in counseling has identified specific characteristics that counselors should have to be effective with their clients. For this study, fifty of these characteristics, taken from the literature, have been placed into four categories: (1) innate characteristics, such as race, gender, and age; (2) characteristics acquired through personal development and life experience, such as attentiveness, clarity, and trustworthiness; (3) characteristics that have been learned, such as organization and analytical and critical competence; and (4) characteristics conferred by institutions, such as education, degrees, and titles. While these characteristics are attributed to effective counseling in a general sense, this study examines the variance of their importance as viewed by college counselors and by clients who are economically and academically disadvantaged college students, primarily black and Hispanic. The study combines the fifty characteristics to allow for an optimal selection from the literature and attempts to delineate the varying degrees of importance to indicate and analyze by gender which are most essential and least essential for counselors of disadvantaged students

Counselor education · Disadvantaged · Higher education · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Political science · Counseling Practices and Supervision · Higher Education Research Studies · Law · Mentoring and Academic Development · Psychology · Social Psychology