NCC key terms

The ongoing process of telling clients in plain language about counseling's purposes, risks, benefits, alternatives, fees, and limits of confidentiality so they can freely decide whether to participate.

The ethical and legal duty to keep private what clients disclose in counseling, sharing it only with valid written consent or when law and safety require an exception.

A legal obligation, rooted in the Tarasoff case, to breach confidentiality and take reasonable steps, such as warning an identifiable victim or notifying police, when a client presents a serious threat of violence.

A situation in which a counselor holds, at the same time or soon after, another role with a client or someone close to the client; ethics require judging the risk of harm rather than applying a blanket ban.

A legal duty to notify designated authorities when a counselor suspects child abuse or neglect, and often elder or dependent-adult abuse, regardless of what the client wants.

A closed-minded stance in which counselors assume their own cultural values are universal, overlook the client's cultural context, and rely on stereotypes instead of learning the client's lived experience.

Brief, commonplace verbal, nonverbal, or environmental messages, often unintentional, that convey hostility, dismissal, or denigration toward people because of their marginalized group membership.

The process of change in beliefs, values, language, and behavior that occurs when a person or group has sustained contact with another culture; common strategies include integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalization.

A lifelong practice of self-reflection, openness to correction, and attention to power in which counselors accept the limits of their cultural knowledge and treat clients as experts on their own experience.

Stage-based models describing how a person's understanding of their racial or ethnic group membership changes over time, often from unexamined acceptance of dominant views toward a secure, self-authored identity.

Four stages (sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational) describing how thinking develops from acting on objects to abstract, hypothetical reasoning, with each stage reorganizing the one before it.

Eight lifespan stages, each centered on a crisis such as trust versus mistrust or identity versus role confusion, whose resolution shapes later personality, relationships, and adjustment.

Bowlby and Ainsworth's view that early caregiver responsiveness builds internal working models, secure, anxious, or avoidant, that guide how a person seeks closeness, handles distress, and expects others to respond.

A stage theory of moral reasoning progressing from avoiding punishment and serving self-interest, through conforming to social rules and approval, to principled judgment based on justice and universal rights.

A typology pairing six personality and work-environment types (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional) so that closer person-environment congruence predicts greater satisfaction and retention.

A developmental theory in which careers unfold through growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, and disengagement stages across several life roles, with the self-concept implemented through work.

Savickas's revision of career maturity: the readiness to handle developmental tasks and work disruptions through four resources, namely concern for the future, control, curiosity, and confidence.

A theory of how children narrow occupational options by ruling out roles seen as sex-inappropriate, then eliminate options that clash with social class and ability, and later compromise aspirations for realism.

The classic matching approach associated with Parsons: gather dependable information about the person's traits and about the occupation, then help the client choose the best available fit.

The collaborative bond of trust plus agreement between counselor and client on goals and tasks; measured repeatedly, it predicts outcome across most theoretical orientations.

Rogers's core condition of sensing the client's inner world as if from inside and communicating that understanding, while keeping the boundary between self and client intact.

Nonjudgmental acceptance and prizing of the client as a person, offered apart from approval of particular behaviors, which helps the client risk self-exploration and change.

The client's redirecting onto the counselor of feelings, expectations, and relational patterns carried from earlier significant relationships, which can be noticed and used as therapeutic material.

The counselor's emotional reactions to a client that arise from the counselor's own history and needs; unexamined they distort therapy, but used well they reveal useful information.

A client-centered yet directive method for strengthening intrinsic motivation by exploring and resolving ambivalence, relying on open questions, affirmations, reflective listening, and summaries.

The sense of belonging, safety, and mutual support among group members that lets them take interpersonal risks; it is one of the stronger predictors of group outcome.

The predictable phases a counseling group passes through, namely formation, transition and conflict, working, and termination, each requiring different leader tasks and member responses.

Content is what the group talks about; process is how members interact while doing so, including who speaks, who withdraws, and what passes between them, and here-and-now comments address process.

Yalom's mechanisms of change in groups, such as universality, altruism, instillation of hope, corrective recapitulation of the family, interpersonal learning, catharsis, and imparting information.

The consistency of test scores across items, occasions, or raters; it sets a ceiling on validity, and a test can be reliable without being valid for a given purpose.

The degree to which evidence and theory support the interpretations and uses of test scores; it belongs to interpretations, not to the instrument as a fixed label.

An estimate of the average size of error in an individual's test score, used to build confidence intervals around that score; it decreases as reliability increases.

The percentage of people in the norm group who scored at or below a given score; it is a rank rather than the percent of items correct, and it stretches apparent differences near the middle.

Systematic error in which a test's scores carry different meaning or predict less accurately for one group than another, often because content, language, or norms reflect a single culture.

The statistical assumption that no relationship or difference exists in the population; results are judged by how unlikely the observed data would be if this assumption were true.

Rejecting the null hypothesis when it is actually true, that is, concluding a difference exists when it does not; researchers set the acceptable rate, alpha, in advance.

A standardized estimate of how large a difference or relationship is, independent of sample size, which complements significance testing and supports practical judgment about results.

A number from negative one to positive one expressing the strength and direction of a linear relationship between two variables; it does not by itself show that one variable causes the other.

The extent to which a study's design supports the claim that the independent variable, rather than confounds such as history, maturation, or selection, produced the observed change.