Perceptions Of Counselor Expertness Attractiveness Trustworthiness And Competence As Functions Of Counselor Weight And Gender And Subject Weight And Gender

Author : Steven Jeffrey Stein
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (812 download)

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Download or read book Client's Perception of Counselor Trustworthiness, Expertness, and Attractiveness as a Function of Counselor Race and Dialect written by Steven Jeffrey Stein and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study investigated how a counselor's speech style affected racially different clients' judgments of a counselor's trustworthiness, expertness, and attractiveness. Additionally, the study examined the quest ion of whether certain counselor speech styles enhanced the amount of information which was retained by clients who had contact with a particular counselor. This study also attempted to determine whether subjects changed their ratings of a counselor over the course of three contacts with a counselor due to the counselor's speech style. Finally, this investigation raised the question of whether black clients and white clients would indicate a preference for a particular counselor style based upon their own (client) race. A counselor's vocal accent has been identified as one of several important aspects of his or her total cultural and/or racial identity, Sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that listeners, often influenced by their own backgrounds, have preferential attitudes toward certain speech styles. This study attempted to integrate these related themes in an empirical fashion by measuring, with the Counselor Rating Form, subjects' attitudes toward the following four counselor conditions: (1) A black counselor speaking with a black English accent, (2) the same black counselor speaking without an accent, (3) a white counselor speaking with a southern English accent, and (4) the same white counselor speaking without an accent. Forty black and forty white male inpatient clients who were participating in an eight week alcohol rehabilitation program at the East Orange, New Jersey, Veterans Administration Medical Center served as subjects. Results were analyzed by analysis of variance (ANOVA) and revealed that, overall, no one of the four different counselor conditions was "superior" to any of the others. The sole exception to this was for the subset of black subjects and only when they rated the black counselor. Under this condition, the dimension of counselor expertness was enhanced when the counselor spoke in unaccented English. The dimensions of counselor trustworthiness and attractiveness were not affected. The amount of information recalled by subjects was not differentially influenced by any of the four different counselor conditions. One serendipitous finding emerged: universally, the black subjects gave higher ratings to the counselors than did the white subjects. All the findings are discussed in light of previous, related research from the areas of cross-cultural counseling and sociolinguistics. Implications for the practitioner are discussed and future research questions are recommended.