Differences between national accreditation standards and graduate ethics training pedagogy among licensed professional counselors (LPC) receiving board sanctions for ethics violations

The impact of CACREP accreditation on the professional competencies and behaviors of counselor education graduates who pursue licensure as professional counselors has received little empirical investigation. The counseling literature clearly illustrates a concern among the counseling profession regarding ethical violations, questions pertaining to how counseling professionals are trained in ethical decision-making and conduct, and evidence that meaningful differences may exist between CACREP-accredited and other-accredited counselor education programs as well as between the type of ethics training students receive.;This study investigated the differences between fully-licensed graduates of CACREP and other-accredited counselor education programs on ethical misconduct as measured by the frequency and type of ethics violations. An additional purpose of this study was to examine to what extent the frequency of ethics violations was accounted for by the interaction of accreditation, ethics training, years in service, and graduate degree.;A national sample of archived data related to sanctions received by licensed professional counselors (LPC) was collected from state licensing boards and publicly accessible Internet databases. Two univariate chi-square analyses and one multiway frequency analysis were employed to investigate the extent to which the interaction of national accreditation standards, ethics training, years in service, and graduate degree accounted for the frequency of ethics violations.;Results indicated that accreditation standards impacted the frequency of ethical misconduct (p <.05). In addition, the number of years in service was found to be statistically significantly related to the frequency of ethics violations.;A model with predictive ability to account for the frequency of ethical misconduct among fully-licensed professional counselors was assessed. However, because additional factors hypothesized to account for ethical misconduct were not available for analysis suggestions for further research are discussed.