Consultation in the School Psychology Literature: Has the Field Moved beyond the Three Traditional Models?

Consultation is a crucial role for school psychology practitioners. Psychologists routinely use consultation within the schools and actually wish they could spend more of their work hours on this activity. However, when authors write about consultation in the school psychology literature, they use n...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Seibert, Michelle L.
Format: Others
Published: TopSCHOLAR® 2010
Subjects:
Online Access:http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/145
http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1145&context=theses
Description
Summary:Consultation is a crucial role for school psychology practitioners. Psychologists routinely use consultation within the schools and actually wish they could spend more of their work hours on this activity. However, when authors write about consultation in the school psychology literature, they use numerous terms and phrases, which cause confusion as to what models of consultation are prominent in the field. The focus of the current study is to examine the articles that mention consultation in School Psychology Review (Digest) in order to determine whether the three traditional models (behavioral, mental health, and organizational consultation) are still prominent in consultation research and school psychology literature. Analyses of all articles containing the word "consultation" and all words preceding the word "consultation" were done to find the most frequently mentioned consultation terms. Analyses were then done on just the consultation research articles as well as other sources in order to find which terms are most frequently mentioned as part of studies and how the most prominent terms originated. The findings revealed that while behavioral consultation seems to be the traditional model still dominating the literature, mental health and organizational are beginning to fall behind in a shift from using specific models to more frequently using generic terms such as school, school-based or teacher consultation.