Opinions of psychological counselors for online counseling: A qualitative study

This research is a qualitative study in which psychological counselors working in different fields and expertise of counseling profession described in terms of their perception and opinions about the online counseling practices. A total of twelve psychological counselors participated in the study, nine of them were women and three of them were men. Three of these participants are the online counseling service providers, nine participants have never provided online counseling before. In order to collect the data, "a semi-structured interview form" and "a demographic information form" prepared by the researcher were used. The data obtained from the research was analyzed through content analysis which is one of the qualitative data analysis methods and the findings were presented as main and sub-themes. As a result of the research, the perceptions and opinions of the psychological counselors working in different fields and expertise of counseling have been gathered under the four main themes and the sixty sub-themes and their main themes are as follows: (1) the psychological counselors' openness to online counseling, (2) the knowledge of the psychological counselors about the process of the online counseling and its application methods (3) the perceptions of psychological counselors on ethical standards in the online counseling practices; (4) the opinions of the counselors on their expert competence in online counseling. In consequence of the study, it was observed that the psychological counselors participated in the research have positive attitudes towards online counseling. It was also observed that, they do not have enough knowledge about the online counseling and it was seen that the psychological counselors have some ethical concerns about the viability of the online counseling practices in Turkey. The psychological counselors stated that the most effective method of practice in the online counseling is the videoconferencing method and they thought that it would be difficult to establish a therapeutic relationship with text-based implementation methods. Besides, the psychological counselors stated that in order to be able to provide the online counseling services, a training background on online counseling applications should be provided and the expert who will provide the online counseling should be prone to the technology.