Psychometric Evaluation of the Traditional Chinese Version of CCS-R Practicum Evaluation and the Assessment of the Counselling Competencies Among Young Peer Counsellors in Hong Kong

Clinical supervisors are charged with facilitating the development of their supervisees toward becoming ethical and competent. In addition, clinical supervisors are expected to serve as gatekeepers for the profession and deny entry to students who demonstrate a deficiency of necessary competencies. Despite the developmental and remedial expectations for clinical supervisors, specific guidelines to direct clinical supervisors' evaluation of their supervisees' level of counseling competencies are limited. The lack of agreed-upon and standardized evaluation criteria for supervisees' minimum level of counseling competencies and the limited availability of tested assessments to measure supervisees' counseling competencies fosters subjectivity in supervisory assessment and potential remediation. Therefore, additional research is warranted relating to clinical supervisory evaluation instruments.

Supervisory evaluation is "the nucleus of clinical supervision". Specifically, "supervisors document and provide supervisees with ongoing feedback regarding their performance and schedule periodic formal evaluative sessions throughout the supervisory relationship". However, clinical supervisors are often uncomfortable in evaluating their supervisees. Nevertheless, effective and ethical supervision supports supervisees' development of counseling competencies in which supervisors provide their supervisees with both formative and summative evaluative feedback within the context of a strong supervisory alliance. Limited research was identified investigating supervisory evaluation processes with standardized assessment tools such as the counselling competencies in Hong Kong.

An initial quantitative investigation of the 23-item counselling competencies scale-revised (CCS-R) supported the construct validity (e.g., exploratory factor analysis identified a five-factor model [professional behaviors, professional behaviors, counseling skills, assessment and application, and professional dispositions], accounting for 72.61% of the variance), internal consistency reliability, interrater reliability (r ¼.570), and criterion-related validity (correlation between supervisees' practicum course grade and final CCS score, r ¼.407,) of the instrument. The researchers concluded that "the CCS is a promising instrument for assessment in counselor education and supervision". Nevertheless, qualitative data are warranted to evaluate the CCS with a sample of clinical supervisors and their supervisees around its (a) functionality in communication of supervisory feedback with the CCS, (b) consistency in CCS evaluation, and (c) emotional reactions to supervisory evaluation with the CCS. Therefore, this study aims to translate the original Counselor Competencies Scale-Revised (CCS-R, English version) into traditional Chinese. It will then test the psychometric properties of the newly translated CCS-R to examine its factorial structure using both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and CFA.