Yih-Jiun Shen, D.Ed.

, is an assistant professor with the Department of Educational Psychology and Leadership, Texas Tech University, Lubbock. E-mail: jean.shen@ttu.edu Robert Jay Lowinger is an adjunct assistant professor with the Department of Psychology, SUNY College at Old Westbury, NY.

School Counselors Self-Perceived Asian American Counseling Competence

Two hundred and three school counselors were surveyed online concerning their perceived competence when counseling Asian American students. Although the counselors had limited interactions with the population, they reported a self-assured overall competency. Specifically, they felt competent about the awareness domain, somewhat competent about the skills domain, yet unsure about the knowledge domain. Recruiting counselors with Asian backgrounds and continuously providing preservice training and professional development concerning Asian American counseling are recommended. ince the mid-1980s, the number of Asian American children and adolescents in the United States has increased from 1.5 million to more than 2.6 million (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000, 2006). As of 2004, more than 2.1 million were enrolled in K-12 school settings (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005). In addition to the developmental concerns faced by all students, and the stigmatization and discrimination faced by minority students, this erroneously labeled model minority may face additional acculturation problems (e.g., Bemak & Chung, 2003; Lee & Zane, 1998). For instance, value clashes between the Eastern and Western cultures have resulted in intergenerational conflicts contributing to Asian American youths identity confusion that may further affect their self-concept and identity formation (for examples, see Lee & Zane; Lowinger & Kwok, 2001). School counselors have the potential to alleviate these youths concerns. To assist school counselors in their work with Asian American students, professional literature provides some guidelines. According to the Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development (AMCD), multicultural counseling competencies involve (a) awareness of counselors own worldviews and how the counselors and their clients are the products of cultural conditioning, (b) knowledge of the worldviews of culturally different clients, and (c) skills necessary to work with culturally different clients (American Counseling Association [ACA], n.d.; Sue, Arredondo, & McDavis, 1992). Counselors training, experience, and demographics also have been associated with multicultural competence (Constantine, 2002; Holcomb-McCoy & Myers, 1999). However, the amount of counselors practical experience and how competent school counselors perceive themselves in working with Asians have hardly been investigated. In the present study, the following research questions examined school counselors ability to provide counseling services to Asian American students: (a) How do school counselors perceive their ability to respond to the counseling needs of Asian American students? (b) How do school counselors rate their awareness, knowledge, and skills in working with these students? (c) How do school counselors perceived competencies vary based on their training, self-identified experience, and demographics?

METHOD
Procedure and Participants This online survey used the 5,260 school counselors of the American School Counselor Association (ASCA) with e-mail addresses as the population frame. A systematic sampling stratified by state and school level yielded 1,833 counselors across all 50 states and K-12 settings. Excluding 538 undeliverable or invalid e-mails, the return rate was 15.7%. On average, the 203 participants were 47.3 years of age with 11.4 years experience as school counselors. The sample (80.8% female and 19.2% male) included 90.6% Caucasians and 9.4% other ethnicities. Regarding work settings, 35.5% of the counselors worked in elementary schools, 46.7% in secondary schools, and 17.7% in multiple or unspecified settings; 20.7% in metropolitan or urban areas, 45.3% in suburban areas, and 34% in rural areas. Most of the schools (88.6%) had less than 10% Asian Americans, whereas 11.4% of the schools had more than 10%. Among the 70.9% of the counselors having multicultural counseling courses, 74.8% had a course unit in counseling Asian American children. Among the 91.6% of the counselors having field
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experience during their training, 48.4% counseled Asian Americans during the field experience. Among the 62.6% of the counselors who had attended multicultural counseling workshops, 82.4% received information at these workshops on counseling Asian American students. Overall, 53.2% of the counselors identified themselves as having little or no practical experience with Asian American students, whereas 35.5% had some, and 11.4% had considerable to extensive experience. Instrument Based on instruments measuring mental health professionals multicultural counseling competence (e.g., Holcomb-McCoy & Myers, 1999; Sodowsky, Taffe, Gutkin, & Wise, 1994) and incorporating literature discussing the issues related to counseling Asian American youth (e.g., Yeh, 2001), an Asian American Counseling Competence Scale operationalizing AMCDs competencies was developed for this study to measure school counselors perceived counseling competence with Asian American students. Three professors in counselor education, language and literacy, and psychometric measurement examined the content validity and clarity of the draft questionnaire, including demographic items, prior to the pilot test with 31 school counselors. To ensure parsimony and to increase distinctiveness among scale constructs, the original 39 competence items measured on a Likert scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) were reduced to 20 after reliability, correlation, and factor analysis were computed. The eigenvalues and scree plot indicated there were three factors. A principal components analysis with a promax procedure (oblique rotation) yielded factors labeled awareness, knowledge, and skills accounting for 58.29% of the variance. With a .94 alpha reliability coefficient, the 20 items were grouped into Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills subscales. The intersubscale correlations (r) ranged from .50 to .77. (Tables are available upon request.)

How do school counselors perceive their ability to respond to the counseling needs of Asian American students?

ence, and other demographics were treated as independent variables, and the total and specific competencies were treated as dependent variables. Type I error was controlled via a .001 significance level. A series of analysis of variance (ANOVA) procedures testing the relationship between the independent variables and participants overall perceived competence (dependent variable) indicated that, in general, counselors with the following conditions were more likely to feel competent than were counselors without these conditions: multicultural counseling courses and workshops including information specifically on counseling Asian American children and adolescents, F (1, 141) = 17.22, p < .001, 2 = .11 and F (1, 123) = 27.56, p < .001, 2 = .18; and field experience and practical experience involved with Asian American students, F (1, 182) = 35.10, p < .001, 2 = .16 and F (1, 201) = 36.55, p < .001, 2= .15. A series of multivariate ANOVA and follow-up univariate analyses testing the specific perceived competencies indicated that counselors with the aforementioned conditions also were more likely to feel competent in awareness, knowledge, and skills than were counselors without these conditions. ANOVAs and MANOVAs testing the overall and specific perceived competencies showed no significant differences based on counselors generic multicultural counseling courses or generic multicultural workshops, the percentage of Asian American students in schools, age, gender, work setting or location, years in position, or academic degrees of the participants. Furthermore, the ANOVA and a MannWhitney U test indicated that there were no significant differences in counselors overall and specific perceived competencies based on generic field experience.

DISCUSSION
In general, the school counselors in this study perceived themselves as being somewhat competent in counseling Asian American students, based on the counselors minimal practical experience with this ethnic group, which accounted for 4.6% of the student body in their schools. The results of this study indicate that counselors practical experience is significantly related to perceived competence. Interestingly, despite the minimal experience in counseling Asian American students reported by the majority of the school counselors, they tended to report that they were competent providing this type of service. Thus, it is possible that some respondents were unaware of their lack of competence or reported their desired ought-to-be competence (Constantine, 2002; Holcomb-McCoy & Myers, 1999). It is evident that counselor education programs and counselors should not overlook the value of aug-

RESULTS
Perceived Competence The school counselors perceived their overall ability in counseling Asian American students to be somewhat competent (M = 3.47, SD = .60). The counselors perceived themselves being competent in awareness (M = 3.99, SD = .63), somewhat competent in skills (M = 3.46, SD = .65), but unsure in knowledge of counseling Asian Americans (M = 3.03, SD = .79). Competence Differences Based on Counselors Training, Experience, and Demographics Counselors training, self-identified practical experi-

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menting prospective and practicing school counselors exposure to Asian American clients. Moreover, among the three competencies, the school counselors felt least competent about their knowledge as opposed to their awareness and skills. This finding is consistent with that of HolcombMcCoy and Myers (1999), who reported that 151 ACA and AMCD counselors viewed their knowledge domain as the weakest among several areas of multicultural counseling competence. The current study shows that self-reported knowledge of Asian Americans is highly related to the counselors perceived competence. Because knowledge attainment requires an accumulation of factual information going well beyond classroom learning, school counselors should actively seek experience to better absorb Asian culture and reduce possible counseling barriers. It is worth noting that due to the lack of ethnic diversity among the participants in this study, the relationship between counselors ethnicity and perceived competence was not tested. The lack of ethnic minority school counselors in this sample is consistent with results of previous studies of school counselor demographics (e.g., Holcomb-McCoy, 2005) and reflects the shortage of U.S. ethnic minority school counselors. This situation may discourage ethnic minorities from pursuing counseling services. The lack of role models among ethnic minority school counselors also may inhibit ethnic minority students from considering school counseling as a profession. To better serve Asian Americans, it is desirable for counselor education programs to actively recruit Asian American counselor trainees and support them through the certification or licensing process. Finally, generalization of this studys findings requires caution. Like many studies measuring counselors perceived multicultural competence (e.g., Holcomb-McCoy, 2005; Sodowsky et al., 1994), this study did not assess actual ability. Only ASCA members with Internet access were studied. The online survey generated a low return rate. The results may not apply well to counselors working in schools with large numbers of Asian Americans. The within-group differences among the exceptional array of distinct cultural and ethnic categories within the Asian American population were not well addressed (Lee & Zane, 1998; Sandhu, 1997). Despite these limitations, this study provides initial exploration of Asian American counseling competencies among school counselors on a large scale.

Clearly, much additional research is needed regarding counseling services with Asian American students in U.S. schools. References
American Counseling Association. (n.d.). Cross-cultural competencies and objectives. Retrieved July 6, 2006, from http://www.counseling.org/Resources/ Bemak, F., & Chung, R. C.-Y. (2003). Multicultural counseling with immigrant students in schools. In P. B. Pedersen & J. C. Carey (Eds.), Multicultural counseling in schools: A practical handbook (pp. 84104). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Constantine, M. G. (2002). Racism attitudes, White racial identity attitudes, and multicultural counseling competence of school counselor trainees. Counselor Education and Supervision, 41, 162174. Holcomb-McCoy, C. C. (2005). Investigating school counselors perceived multicultural competence. Professional School Counseling, 8, 414423. Holcomb-McCoy, C. C., & Myers, J. E. (1999). Multicultural competence and counselor training: A national survey. Journal of Counseling and Development, 77, 294302. Lee, L. C., & Zane, N. W. S. (Eds.). (1998). Handbook of Asian American psychology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lowinger, R. J., & Kwok, H. (2001). Parental overprotection in Asian American children: A psychodynamic clinical perspective. Psychotherapy, 38, 319330. Sandhu, D. S. (1997). Psychocultural profiles of Asian and Pacific Islander Americans: Implications for counseling and psychotherapy. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 25, 722. Sodowsky, G. R., Taffe, R. C., Gutkin, T. B., & Wise, S. L. (1994). Development of the Multicultural Counseling Inventory: A self-report measure of multicultural competencies. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 41, 137148. Sue, D. W., Arredondo, P., & McDavis, R. J. (1992). Multicultural competencies and standards: A call to the profession. Journal of Counseling and Development, 70, 477486. U.S. Census Bureau. (2000, April 11). National estimates: Quarterly population estimates, 1980 to 1990. Quarterly intercensal resident population 4/1/19841/1/1985. Retrieved July 11, 2006, from http://www.census.gov/ popest/archives/1980s/80s_nat_detail.html U.S. Census Bureau. (2005, October 3). Table 1. Enrollment status of the population 3 years old and over, by sex, age, race, Hispanic origin, foreign born, and foreign-born parentage: October 2004. Retrieved July 10, 2006, from http://www. census.gov/population/socdemo/school/cps2004/ tab01-05.xls U.S. Census Bureau. (2006, March). Table 1. Population by sex and age, for Asian alone and White alone, not Hispanic: March 2004. Retrieved July 12, 2006, from http://www. census.gov/population/socdemo/race/api/ppl-184/ tab1.html

The counselors perceived themselves being competent in awareness, somewhat competent in skills, but unsure in knowledge of counseling Asian Americans.

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