The Shared Experiences of Mental Health Providers Delivering Faith-Accommodated Interventions in a Public-School Setting in Rural Central Texas

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe the lived experience of counselors around providing faith-accommodated counseling interventions in a school-based mental health setting in rural Central Texas. The theory guiding this study was Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) bioecological systems theory (EST) as it gives a framework for illustrating the impact of graduate academic institutions and governing bodies on faith-accommodated counseling in a public-school setting. Data was collected and analyzed using the conceptual mapping task (CMT) protocol. The CMT protocol is a four-phase transtheoretical interview process with built-in-member-checking features. Member checking is a qualitative technique using participant feedback on the data collected, which is vital to ensure the credibility of the data collected. The study’s findings indicated that individual counselor characteristics (i.e., religiosity/spirituality) affect how they approach accommodating the religious/spiritual beliefs, values, and practices of their counselees. Further, their competency around that accommodation was affected by their counselor training programs, the lack of workplace policies or training, and their understanding of the construct of church-state separation. The findings of this study led to recommendations for state level policymakers around shoring up school counselor competencies and alignment between religious/spiritual competency across the range of counselors and social workers involved in school-based mental health.