Article

Determining the Profession’s Ethical Requirements in School Psychological Counseling Services

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to determine school psychological counselors’ perspectives on professional ethics knowledge and skills, the requirements, and their opinions related to ethical problems encountered in the profession and ways of solving them. The research has been formed using the phenomenological design, a qualitative research design, and uses a semi-structured open-ended interview form. Categorical analysis, a type of content analysis, has been used in analyzing the data. Interviews have been conducted with 40 school counselors working in different educational institutions. The results reveal school psychologists’ ethical knowledge and skills to be important in terms of the effective functioning of psychological counseling services. Helping the psychological counseling and guidance (PCG) specialist to be able to apply ethical principles and being competent in providing ethical service in the PCG specialist’s field have been determined as requirements for the training managers. The most frequently experienced ethical problem appears as confidentiality: In other words, this has been experienced on the topic of ensuring client’s privacy and in showing unconditional acceptance towards different cultures. The main ethical principle that should be applied has emerged as the need to provide confidentiality. Collegial assistance has been sought after in dealing with ethical problems. According to the results, the requirement of receiving education on how to regulate the ethical principles that need to be followed in school PCG services as well as how to deal with the ethical principles and problems of educational administrators’ psychological counseling services by using school PCG specialists is recommended.

Keywords

School counselor Counseling Ethics Ethical problem Vocational ethics