Date of Conferral

2021

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Counselor Education and Supervision

Advisor

Geneva Gray

Abstract

Counseling is an essential service that helps individuals work through struggles and live their best lives. Such service now includes providing counseling in clients’ homes. Counselors may require specific training or education to prepare for counseling in a home environment. This need for training and education is due to a lack of knowledge of the lived experiences of counselors providing services in the home. Transcendental phenomenology was used to guide a qualitative exploration into the lived experiences of counselors providing services in clients’ homes. Participants were 7 professional counselors, 5 female and 2 male, having met minimum state licensure requirements and having at least 6 months of in-home counseling experience. Data were collected from semi structured interviews, comprised of self-created open-ended questions, to obtain insight into the clinicians’ experiences of providing in-home counseling services. Phenomenological reduction, systematic content analysis, and bracketing of the data resulted in three major themes: (a) counselor preparation and support, (b) therapeutic relationship, and (c) environmental factors. Two subthemes identified were (a) barriers and (b) comfort. These themes and subthemes that arose from the data collected may lead to future research on the preparation and education needs of counselors providing services in clients’ homes. The results of this research may lead to the development of new training for current counselors providing in-home counseling and new practice model or educational courses or programming for future counselors. Such program development will help counselors follow evidence based best practices; ensuring a more positive and beneficial experience for counselors and clients.

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