Examining School Counselors’ Years of Experience,Hope,and Service Delivery

Abstract

In recent years, hope has emerged as a potentially beneficial factor for school counselors’ self-efficacy and job satisfaction. To date, scholars have not yet explored the relationships between school counselors’ levels of hope and the services they deliver in school counseling practice. To explore the predictive nature of hope on school counselors’ service delivery, and to control for school counselors’ years of practice in the field, we conducted a series of hierarchical regressions with a sample of 76 practicing school counselors to examine whether hope would predict the services school counselors deliver. We first examined whether school counselors’ years of practice would predict their service delivery. We then added hope to the model to examine to what extent hope might explain the variance in school counselors’ service delivery. Our findings indicated that school counselors’ years of practice predict their counseling and coordinating activities. When we added hope to the model, hope had a larger predictive effect on counseling, consulting, and coordinating activities than years of practice. Neither years of practice nor hope were predictive of school counselors’ curriculum or other activities. These findings add to the literature on school counselors’ hope and suggest that hope may predict what school counselors do in their work. We offer implications for practice, training, and future research.