A Correlation Study on the Counseling Psychology Interns’ Perfectionism, Anxiety and Counseling Self-efficacy
Abstract
This study aimed to discuss the relationship among perfectionism, anxiety and counseling self-efficacy of counseling psychology interns. Through the use of a questionnaire, the perfectionism scale for practitioners and interns, the state of anxiety and the counseling self-efficacy scales, this study took 187 counseling psychology interns in the North, Middle, South and East Taiwan as the study samples and analyzed the materials and data through descriptive statistics, independent samples t-test, ANOVA analysis, path analysis, stepwise multiple regression and other statistical methods.
The major findings of this study were as follows:
1. The perfectionist tendency of most counseling psychology interns is between “never showing perfectionism” and “sometimes showing perfectionism”. The anxiety state is between “feels anxiety occasionally” and “feels anxiety often”. The confidence level when providing counseling is between “having some confidence” to “quite confident”.
2. Counseling psychology interns with more than 3 years work experience tend to show lower “overall perfectionism” and “socially-prescribed perfectionism” than interns with less than 1 year work experience.
3. Counseling psychology interns with more than 3 years work experience tend to show higher “overall counseling self-efficacy” and “individual counseling self-efficacy” than interns with less than 2 years work experience.
4. The perfectionism of counseling psychology interns has direct influence on their anxiety, and the latter has direct influence on their self-efficacy. Their perfectionism has indirect impacts on the counseling self-efficacy; therefore, the anxiety is the intervening variables.
5. The anxiety of counseling psychology interns can effectively predict the counseling self-efficacy.
Therefore, based on the above findings, this study puts forward some recommendations for counseling psychology interns, graduate institutes of counseling psychology and may serve as a reference for related researches to be done in the future.
