Expectations about religious and lay counselors of public and private high school students

This is an exploration on the public and private high school students\u27 expectations about religious and lay counselors, counselee characteristics, attitudes, and behaviors, and counseling process and outcome. The study made use of the descriptive-comparative-correlational research design. It employed the survey method through the use of the Expectations About Counseling of EAC-Brief form questionnaire. The subjects were public and private high school students of Manila enrolled during school year 1994-1995. A total of 320 students participated in this study. The EAC-Brief form was modified for the purpose of this study and was administered twice to the same groups of students in both public and private schools. The interval period between the two test administrations was one week. The Questionnaire on Expectations about Religious Counselors was administered during the first week and the Questionnaire on Expectations about Lay Counselors was administered during the second week. The overall findings of the study revealed high expectations about religious and lay counselors. Using Pearson product moment correlation, the survey showed significant low correlations between expectations and respondents\u27 age and year level. The expectation about religious counselor expertise was found significantly and positively related with age. Using the t-tests for uncorrelated samples, the differences in the respondents\u27 expectations were reported. Such were based on their sex (female/male), religion (Catholic-non-Catholic), school (public/private), and experience in counseling (with/without experience). Expectations about religious counselors varied among the respondents. The private school respondents showed higher expectations about religious counselors than the public school respondents. The respondents with experience in counseling showed higher expectations about religious counselors than respondents without experience in counseling. The female respondents showed higher expectations about lay counselors than did the male respondents. There were no differences in expectations about religious and lay counselors between Catholic and non-Catholic respondents. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) results showed a significant difference in the respondents\u27 expectations on counselor genuineness. The respondents revealed higher expectations on religious counselor genuineness as compared to their expectations on lay counselor genuineness