| Summary: | M.A. === Professional identity development of counselling psychologists in South-Africa occurs through seven (and possibly eight) phases of professional development. Phases of professional development are necessary when one attempts to establish optimal levels of professional identity development for counselling psychologists in terms of their experience and training. Using these phases, counselling psychologists may be compared in each development phase to ascertain his/her development or the lack thereof. The phases also serve as guidelines for both the training personnel and the counselling psychologist, enabling them to affect certain changes or modifications in order to optimise professional development for the counselling psychologist. The benefits of optimised development should not be underestimated. The objective of this comparative research study was to ascertain the extent of similarities found in the professional development phases, as postulated by Skovholt and Ronnestad (1995) and the results of the current research study. The eight phases are the conventional phase, transition to professional training phase, imitation of experts phase, conditional autonomy phase, exploration phase, integration phase, individuation phase and the integrity phase. The research strategy consists of a qualitative analysis of responses obtained from a structured interview. Analysis is made possible by way of a replication strategy together with the use of a matrix. The matrix consists of eight categories used by Skovholt and Ronnestad (1995) to describe the relevant developmental phase and to regulate the responses. After describing and allocating the responses according to the categories of the matrix, a storyline is derived by use of an iteration process. Themes become apparent which outline the developmental path across the eight proposed professional developmental phases. Both the categories and the themes are compared to those proposed by Skovholt and Ronnestad (1995). Great similarity was found. The differences and themes derived from this study can also be used as hypotheses for further research.
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