Factor structure and measurement invariance of employment counselors’ use of discretionary power and differences based on gender, training, and experience

ABSTRACT

The present study contributes to the further development of mandatory employment counseling practice by creating a new measure to describe differences in counselors’ use of discretionary power. The measure categorizes counselors’ acting and thinking into concrete counseling behavior as well as prioritizations of goals and topics for the counseling process. Behavior is specified into participation, appreciation, transparency, directivity, and active conflict resolution. Goals and topics are subdivided into client- and control-orientation. CFA showed an excellent fit of this model on data from 771 German employment counselors. Additional analyses revealed strict measurement invariance for gender, training, and experience, making the presented measure equally applicable for female and male counselors, as well as for counselors with different training and experience backgrounds. Further, latent mean comparisons revealed that gender had no effect on counselors’ use of discretionary power, but better trained counselors rated themselves as less directive compared to more experienced counselors, who also put more emphasis on control-orientated goals and less emphasis on client-orientated topics. The presented measure and results can be used in employment agencies for supervision and training to sensitize employment counselors for their individual use of discretionary power and enable future research on best practice in employment counseling.

KEYWORDS:

• Mandatory employment counseling
• discretionary power
• measurement invariance
• confirmatory factor analysis
• professional counseling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Additional analyses revealed that the RMSEAs of all baseline models were very low (range: .113 to .120). David Kenny recommended to omit the CFI if the RMSEA of the null model < .158 (http://davidakenny.net/cm/fit.htm) and, consequently, we put less importance on the CFI in the overall interpretation of results. Importantly, the Gamma hat index as another measure of goodness-of-fit that does not have the same technical problems as the CFI and all other fit measures (χ² to df ratio, RMSEA, and SRMR) indicated excellent model fit.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pascal Rickert

Pascal Rickert is working as study advisor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Münster, Germany. Embedded in the work on his PhD, his current research aims at improving the German employment counseling system. His perspective on the actual employment counseling practice is strongly influenced by his professional background as psychologist and systemic-solution-focused counselor.

Boris Forthmann

Boris Forthmann is working as post-doc researcher at the Department of Psychology at the University of Münster, Germany. His research focusses on creativity and divergent thinking. From 2018 onwards, he serves as member of the editorial board of Creativity. Theories-Research-Applications as well as the Journal of Creative Behavior. As expert statistician, he has been working in the departmental statistic support for many years and is still advising researchers at the Department of Psychology

Joscha Kärtner

Joscha Kärtner received his PhD from the Department of Culture and Development at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and is head of the Developmental Psychology Lab and the Counseling Lab at the University of Münster, Germany. His main research interests include cultural influences on social, socio-cognitive and socio-emotional development. Besides basic research in these fields, a second emphasis is on developing programs and policies for counseling and applied developmental science.