ASSESSING ETHICAL JUDGMENT: THE DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF THE COUNSELING ETHICS APPLICATIONS TEST

Purpose. The purpose of this study was to examine the possibility of developing a test instrument entitled the "Counseling Ethics Applications Test" (CEAT) to assess ethical judgment in the field of counseling psychology.;Results. Normative, reliability, and validity data were derived from the CEAT performance of four counseling samples (13 Ph.D. counseling psychologists, 36 Ph.D. counseling psychologist-trainees, 59 Ed.M. counselors, and 35 Ed.M. counselor-trainees) and two noncounseling samples (35 educational administration graduate students and 30 M.S. accountant-trainees).;Normative information included two derived scales, item analysis data, and test statistics. CEAT measurement was found to be broad in range and to yield continuous, normally-distributed scores. The overall item difficulty and validity estimates were found to be satisfactory for the assessment of ethical judgment, particularly over the broad range of ability found within the combined counseling-noncounseling group (n = 208).;A reliability coefficient of .82 was obtained from the Ed.M. counselor-trainee group over a three week test-retest interval. From this figure, an appreciably higher coefficient of .89 was estimated for the heterogeneous combined group.;Test Construction. The CEAT was developed in a step-wise fashion through standard procedures of test construction. The test was designed to provide an operational definition of "ethical judgment ability" or the capacity to discern ethical from unethical responses to counseling problem situations. Material from the American Personnel and Guidance Association's Ethical Standards Casebook (1976) was transported into a pool of 70 pairs of problem stems and ethical responses to which unethical options were added. Each of the resulting four option, multiple-choice items portrayed a counseling problem situation (in one of four broad areas of professional responsibility) in which the correct answer was congruent with the Association's ethics code. Following a process of item revision, the items were pretested on a sample of 351 master's level counselor-trainees from ten selected Pennsylvania universities. Based upon the analysis of this data, the 30 items which demonstrated the highest discriminative power (all item phi coefficients were significant at the .001 level of confidence), and which collectively maximized content coverage (a total of 28 ethics principles were represented), were retained on the CEAT final form.;The assumption that CEAT performance would be related to educational background was supported by the significantly higher (p < .01) mean CEAT scores achieved by counseling-trained individuals in comparison to those educated in other graduate disciplines. The CEAT was also shown to effectively differentiate among subject groups exposed to doctoral as opposed to master's level counseling training.;Conclusions. The results obtained in this study strongly supported the notion that a dimension of ethical judgment in counseling can be directly assessed. An instrument of this type was developed and shown to have a reasonable degree of psychometric robustness. The CEAT emerged a face valid device with an appreciable coverage of ethics principles pertaining to counseling practice. Over short periods of time, CEAT measurement was found to be stable enough for some confidence to be placed upon individual scores. The data also indicated that the CEAT might have primary value as a means for evaluating the efficacy of ethics instruction in counseling training, for diagnosing areas of ethical deficiency for individual remediation, and possibly for beginning the empirical study of correlates of ethical and unethical counseling practice. Directions for test refinement and research applications of the CEAT were discussed.