Supervisor Cultural Humility and Supervisee Nondisclosure: The Supervisory Working Alliance Matters.

Given that half or more of supervisees (therapist trainees) never have their clinical work monitored or observed, supervisees who withhold salient information in clinical supervision compromise supervisors' ability to monitor client welfare and promote supervisees' professional development. Attempting to further understand the factors explaining supervisee nondisclosure, we tested the supervisory working alliance as a mediator of the hypothesized inverse relations of cultural humility and collaborative supervision with supervisee nondisclosure (supervision-related and clinically-related nondisclosure) among a diverse sample of 214 supervisees in applied psychology and allied mental health programs. Results supported the hypotheses that (1) descriptively, supervision-related nondisclosure was more prominent than clinically-related nondisclosure, (2) cultural humility substantially inversely predicted supervisee nondisclosure, and (3) the supervisory working alliance fully mediated the inverse relations of cultural humility and collaborative supervision with supervisee nondisclosure. Understanding the mechanisms underlying supervisee nondisclosure have broad implications for clinicians and researchers alike.

Toward a nuanced understanding of nondisclosure in psychotherapy supervision.

Previous research indicates that trainees often withhold important information related to their clients' progress and their reactions to supervision. Moreover, factors associated with the occurrence of supervisee nondisclosure (SND) are not well established. As one of the few studies to compare clinically related with supervision-related nondisclosure, we tested the relation of these two dimensions of the construct, as measured by Siembor and Ellis's (2012) Supervisee Nondisclosure Scales, to three important process variables: perceptions of (a) the supervisory alliance, as measured by Bahrick's (1989) Working Alliance Inventory-Trainee; (b) collaborative supervision, as measured by Rousmaniere and Ellis's (2013) Collaborative Supervision Behavior Scale; and (c) explicitly relational supervisor behaviors, as measured by Shaffer and Friedlander's (2017) Relational Behavior Scale. Participants were 257 North American trainees, predominately White female doctoral students receiving supervision in a practicum or internship setting. As hypothesized, the three process variables inversely contributed to the multivariate composite of SND, jointly accounting for roughly one quarter of the variability; alliance and relational behavior were uniquely significant contributors (24.5% and 7%, respectively). Follow-up analyses indicated that only alliance perceptions contributed unique variance (23%) to supervision-related nondisclosures, which were endorsed much more frequently than clinically related nondisclosures in this sample. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

A comparative study of clinical supervision in the Republic of Ireland and the United States.

We replicated Son, Ellis, and Yoo (2013) and extended Ellis et al.'s (2014) taxonomy of harmful and inadequate supervision by providing and testing cross-national comparative descriptive data about clinical supervision practices in the Republic of Ireland versus the United States. Participants were 149 Republic of Ireland and 151 U.S. mental health supervisees currently receiving clinical supervision. The results suggested that characteristics of supervision in the Republic of Ireland and United States evidenced both similarities and differences. The dissimilar credentialing systems appeared to account for the observed differences, suggesting that Ellis et al.'s (2014) criteria for inadequate supervision need to be modified to account for country-specific standards for supervision. Unexpectedly, no significant differences were observed between the Republic of Ireland and United States in the high occurrence of inadequate, harmful, or exceptional supervision. The results suggested that 79.2% (Republic of Ireland) and 69.5% (United States) of the supervisees were categorized as currently receiving inadequate supervision, and 40.3% (Republic of Ireland) and 25.2% (United States) of the supervisees as receiving harmful supervision. At some point in their careers, 92.4% (Republic of Ireland) and 86.4% (United States) of the supervisees received inadequate supervision--51.7% (Republic of Ireland) and 39.7% (United States) received harmful supervision. On the positive side, 51.0% (Republic of Ireland) and 55.0% (United States) of the supervisees reported receiving exceptional supervision from their current supervisors. Substantial discrepancies were observed between supervisees' perceptions versus more objective criteria of the inadequate or harmful supervision they received. Implications for cross-national supervision research and training are discussed.

Reducing supervisee anxiety: Effects of a role induction intervention for clinical supervision.

We investigated the effectiveness of a theoretically based role induction (RI) intervention that aimed to clarify supervisee and supervisor role expectations and reduce supervisee anxiety, compared to standard supervision (no-RI). Initially, a feasibility study investigated whether a RI for beginning supervisees would work in the context of a replicated single-subject experimental design; specifically, it assessed whether the RI condition (n = 2) would result in decreased anxiety compared to baseline and a no-RI condition (n = 2). Results suggested that the RI appeared viable and mitigated supervisee anxiety. To address the deficiencies of the feasibility study, for the main study, a more rigorous experimental multiple-baseline research design with randomization procedures was employed to test the effectiveness of the RI intervention for reducing supervisee anxiety in 2 developmentally different groups: beginning supervisees (n = 4) and predoctoral interns (n = 5). Specifically, this study investigated whether supervisee anxiety would be lower following the RI intervention for both groups and whether beginning supervisees would experience larger decreases in anxiety relative to interns. The 3 most salient findings were (a) the efficacy of a RI procedure for reducing the anxiety of novice counselor trainees was tentatively supported, (b) anxiety varied, sometimes markedly, from session to session, but nevertheless was not as pervasive as theorized, and (c) supervisee developmental level appeared to moderate the effects of the RI on supervisee anxiety, such that the RI decreased anxiety for most beginning supervisees and initially increased anxiety for interns. Implications for theory, research, and training are discussed.

A cross-cultural comparison of clinical supervision in South Korea and the United States.

We investigated similarities and differences in clinical supervision in two cultures: South Korea and the United States The study had two parts: (1) a test of the cross-cultural equivalence of four supervision measures; and (2) a test of two competing models of cultural differences in the relations among supervisory style, role difficulties, supervisory working alliance, and satisfaction with supervision. Participants were 191 South Korean and 187 U.S. supervisees currently engaged in clinical supervision. The U.S. measures demonstrated sufficient measurement equivalence for use in South Korea. Cultural differences moderated the relations among supervisory styles, role difficulties, supervisory working alliance, and supervision satisfaction. Specifically, the relations among these variables were significantly stronger for U.S. than for South Korean supervisees. Implications for theory, research, and practice were discussed.

Introducing a brief measure of cultural and religious identification in American Jewish identity.

The authors conducted 3 studies to develop and investigate the psychometric properties of the American Jewish Identity Scales (AJIS), a brief self-report measure that assesses cultural identification and religious identification. Study 1 assessed the content validity of the item pool using an expert panel. In Study 2, 1,884 Jewish adults completed the initial AJIS and various measures of ethnic identity, collective self-esteem, and religiosity. Using confirmatory factor analyses, the authors selected and cross-validated 33 items that loaded highly and differentially on the 2 theorized latent factors. Study 3 assessed the AJIS's short-term stability and its relation to social desirability. Tests of reliability and construct validity provided initial psychometric support for the measure and confirmed the theorized primary salience of cultural identification. Participants reported significantly more private than public collective self-esteem, and the most Jewish-identified participants reported greater private self-esteem, acculturative stress, and perceived discrimination than did their more assimilated counterparts.