Development and Validation of the DOCAS: A Measure of School Counselors’ Attitudes Toward Delivering Online Counseling
This study developed and validated the 15-item Delivering Online Counseling Attitudes Scale (DOCAS) as a psychometrically sound, essentially unidimensional measure of school counselors' attitudes toward online counseling, demonstrating strong reliability and validity through a cross-validation design with 420 Turkish counselors.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Imagine you are a school counselor. Your job is to help students navigate their feelings, solve problems, and find their way. For years, you've done this face-to-face, sitting in a quiet office. But then, the world changed, and suddenly, you had to do it all through a screen. This shift wasn't just about using new technology; it was about changing your whole mindset. In the world of psychology, there's a big idea called the "Theory of Reasoned Action." Think of it like this: before you do anything, you have a feeling about it. If you think doing something is cool and helpful, you'll probably do it. If you think it's weird or risky, you'll probably avoid it, even if you know how to do it. Another helpful idea is the "Information-Motivation-Behavioral Skills" model. This is like a three-legged stool: you need to know what to do (information), you need to want to do it (motivation/attitude), and you need the skills to do it (behavioral skills). If your "want" is weak, the other two legs don't matter much.
Now, here is the tricky part: while everyone was scrambling to learn how to use Zoom or WhatsApp for counseling, no one had a good way to measure how school counselors actually felt about it. Did they think it was a great tool? Did they dread it? Or were they just confused? Without a clear ruler to measure these feelings, it's hard to know how to train counselors or write rules for schools. That's where this study comes in. The researchers wanted to build a brand-new ruler, a survey specifically for school counselors to measure their attitudes toward online counseling. They didn't just want to guess; they wanted to build a tool that was scientifically solid, like a high-precision scale instead of a kitchen guess.
The researchers, Mustafa Özkan and Asuman Yüksel from Bursa Uludağ University in Türkiye, decided to create a new survey called the DOCAS (Delivering Online Counseling Attitudes Scale). They started by writing down about 80 different questions, mixing positive thoughts (like "Online counseling is a great way to reach students") with negative ones (like "I can't build a real connection online"). They asked 420 school counselors to fill out this long list. To make sure their results were fair and not just a fluke, they split the group in half. They used the first half to figure out what the questions were actually measuring, and they used the second half to double-check their work.
At first, the data looked a bit confusing. The positive questions and the negative questions seemed to form two separate groups, almost like two different scales. It looked like counselors might have two different kinds of attitudes: one for the "good stuff" and one for the "bad stuff." However, when the researchers dug deeper using advanced math, they found a surprising truth. They discovered that these two groups weren't actually two different things. Instead, they were just two sides of the same coin. The "positive" questions and the "negative" questions were just measuring one single, strong feeling: a counselor's overall attitude toward online counseling. The reason they looked like two groups was mostly because of how the questions were worded, not because the counselors had two separate minds.
The study found that the best way to use this new tool is to look at the total score, not to split it into parts. The scale turned out to be very reliable. When they asked the same counselors to take the test again three weeks later, their answers were almost exactly the same (a score of .88 out of 1.0), which means the tool is stable and consistent. They also checked if the tool actually worked by seeing if it matched real life. They found that counselors who had a higher total score (meaning they felt more positive overall) actually did online counseling more often. This confirmed that the tool measures what it's supposed to: a counselor's willingness to use online methods.
The paper explicitly rules out the idea that you should score the positive and negative questions separately. Even though the math showed two clusters of questions, the researchers proved that these clusters don't carry enough independent weight to be treated as separate scores. If you tried to use them as separate subscales, you would be measuring the same thing twice in a confusing way. The paper is very sure about this because they tested it with multiple different statistical models, and the "one single score" model always fit the data the best.
So, what does this mean for the future? The researchers suggest that this new scale, the DOCAS, is a ready-to-use tool for schools and universities. It can help educators figure out if counselors need more training or if they just need to change their mindset. It can also help policymakers understand why some schools are great at online counseling while others struggle. The study doesn't claim to have solved every problem with online counseling, but it has handed the field a very sharp, accurate ruler. Now, instead of guessing how counselors feel, we can measure it, understand it, and help them do their jobs better, whether they are sitting in an office or connecting through a screen.
Drowning in papers in your field?
Get daily digests of the most novel papers matching your research keywords — with technical summaries, in your language.