A Content Analysis of Rehabilitation Counseling Supervision Literature

Supervision has been well established as an important evidence-based intervention in the profession of rehabilitation counseling and the relevance and importance of supervision to rehabilitation counseling continues to grow. Recognizing documented themes and emerging trends within professional literature could be useful to influence future research on supervision in rehabilitation counseling. Content analysis is an empirically grounded methodological approach of analyzing written content to determine themes and gauge their potential impact. In this content analysis, we analyzed 63 peer-reviewed journal articles meeting pre-established inclusion criteria to determine: (a) how much scholarship has been published on rehabilitation counseling supervision; (b) what types of journal articles have been addressed in the rehabilitation counseling supervision literature; (c) what topics have been addressed in rehabilitation counseling supervision journal articles, and (d) the emerging trends in the rehabilitation counseling supervision literature. We found 63 journal articles devoted to rehabilitation counseling supervision published in 11 different journals between 1973 and 2023. Among the 63 journal articles, 27 (42.85%) were empirical journal articles and 36 (57.41%) were conceptual journal articles. The topic of supervisors (e.g., roles, development, self-efficacy) was the most frequent topic representing 49.21% of the journal articles included in the analysis followed by ethics at 31.75%. The least frequent topics were client (i.e., client presenting issues, supervising specific population of clients; n = 1, 1.59%), modality (i.e., supervision modality, individual, peer, group, multiple modalities, n = 2; 3.17%) and technology (i.e., use of technology, web-based, n = 5, 7.94%). Trends of publications were compared with previous content analysis studies to determine how rehabilitation counseling aligns with other counseling specialties.