Date of Award
2020
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)
Department
Learning, Leadership and Change
First Advisor
Robert Calvert
First Committee Member
Rod P. Githens
Second Committee Member
Crystal Martinez-Alire
Abstract
Healthy work environments are critical in fostering occupational self-care for helping professionals, but information on the self-care and the work environment is limited among community college counselors in California. Self-care is essential for the counseling profession in California community colleges (CCC), as it promotes wellness, which is needed in order to provide optimal services to students/clients. The lack of self-care results in counselor impairment, leading to undesirable factors (i.e., burnout, health conditions, and decrease in productivity). In educational institutions, counselors often find it difficult to maintain their own self-care. However, work environments have been shown to affect self-care at work (professional self-care). Past studies have suggested that the work environment can help counselors increase their ability to practice self-care. In this quantitative statewide study on 324 CCC counselors, it was found that the work environment was related to and predicted CCC counselors' professional self-care, even when considering demographic variables. Additional findings from this research study indicated that CCC counselors’ workload had the highest relation with counselors’ daily balance. Differences in groups (e.g., demographic/contextual factors) are found among CCC counselors' work environment and professional self-care, with the greatest group difference on CCC counselors’ status (e.g., tenured, adjunct). Results also suggest that CCC counselors who worked overload (if full-time) strengthened the relationship between their professional development and a sense of community in the workplace. However, overload hours worked per week showed a negative association with their sense of community. These results may be useful to community college counselors and administrators for organizational planning, policy, and advocacy of self-care-promoting work environments for CCC counselors. A limitation of the study was that the majority of participants were female, White, and tenured faculty, which may not represent those outside of this population.
Pages
198
Recommended Citation
Dang, Tina. (2020). The Effects of the Work Environment on California Community College Counselors' Professional Self-care. University of the Pacific, Dissertation. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/3695
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