Evaluation of the effectiveness of a short term empathy training program for barefoot counselors

This experimental evaluated the effectiveness of a short-term (30 hours) empathy training program for barefoot or nonprofessional counselors. The posttest only control group design of Campbell and Stanley (1963) was used in this study. The subjects were 30 female bank supervisors randomly assigned to control group and experimental group counselors, each group having 15 members. The subjects had a minimum of five and a maximum of 17 years of work experience in the same bank. Their ages ranged from 35 to 50. The 30 female clients with ages ranged from 25 to 30 years were rank and file employees, also of the same bank. They had a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 11 years of working experience in the same bank. They were randomly divided into two groups of 15 each forming the control and experimental groups. The experimental group of counselors underwent a short-term empathy training program for 30 hours. The control and experimental groups of counselors counseled each client for 20 minutes on an emotional problem. Thirty counseling sessions were video-taped. Later, each client evaluated her respective counselor using the Counseling Evaluation Inventory (CEI). The video-taped counseling sessions were viewed and rated by three female expert raters using the Carkhuff\u27s 5-point empathy scale to rate levels of empathy manifested by the counselors. The t-test for independent samples was calculated to determine significant difference of the CEI scores between the experimental and control groups. A one way analysis of variance with two levels was used to find the significant difference of empathy level between two groups. To calculate the interrater reliability correlation coefficients were obtained then the multiple correlation coefficient as an overall measure of reliability was determined. As rated by expert raters, the experimental group counselors manifested higher levels of empathy during the sessions than the ones of control group. Interrater reliability among raters was quite high. All three components of client experiences as measured by CEI and rated by clients showed significant experimental and control group differences. Clients of experimental group rated their counselors significantly higher than did those counseled by counselors of the control group. The findings drawn from the study were: 1) Short-term empathy training program can train participants to communicate higher levels of empathy to clients in a counseling situation. 2) Counseling climate, counselor comfort and client satisfaction during counselor sessions can be increased by providing short-term empathy training for the nonprofessional counselors. 3) Those who undergo counseling-skills-training perform better in the role of a counselor than those who do not get the training; thus, the experimental group participants can function better in the role of a counselor than the control group members