Investigation of the stress-coping styles of prospective psychological counselors according to their multi-measure agentic personality traits, subjective well-being and risk factors

The study is a descriptive study designed to investigate whether psychological counselor candidates' coping styles with stress differentiate at a significant level or not in terms of their multi-measure agentic personality traits, subjective well-being, risk factors and certain personal variables. The sample of the research consists of the university students registered in the Education Faculty, department of Educational Sciences, Guidance and Psychological Counseling programme in spring semester 2016-2017 from Yıldız Technical University and Istanbul Aydin University. A total of 476 psychological counselor candidates, 356 female and 120 male, participated in the research. The measurement tools used to obtain research data are "The Scale of Coping Styles with Stress", "The Multi- Measure Agentic Personality Scale", "Subjective Well-Being Scale", "List for Identifying Risk Factors" and "Personal Information Form". In the research, MANOVA (Multivariate Analysis of Variance), which is parametric statistics, is used to determine whether psychological counselor candidates' coping styles with stress differentiate at a significant level or not in terms of their multi-measure agentic personality traits, subjective well-being, having risk factors and personal variables. The Wilks'Lambda (λ) test was used to compare group mean scores. Welch Test was also used. The t-test and the Mann-Whitney U test were used to determine where the difference originated. According to the results of the study, 50.9 % of psychological counselor candidates has high level of multi-agentic personality characteristics and 49.1% of them has low level of multi-agentic personality characteristics. 52.2 % of them has high level of subjective well-being and 47.8 % of them has low level of subjective well-being. 71.4 % of them has risk factors. In terms of their coping styles with stress, 52.7 % of them shows self-confidenr style, 49 % of them shows helpless style, 49 % of them shows submissive style, 57.4 % of them shows optimistic style and 53.2 % of them shows seeking of social support style. Also, the results of the study revealed that psychological counselor candidates' scores on coping styles with stress differ significantly according to their multi-measure agentic personality traits, subjective well-being, risk factors, gender, and studying at private or state universities. Key Words: Psychological Counselor Candidates, Coping Styles with Stress, Multi-Measure Agentic Personality, Subjective Well- Being, Risk Factors