APC key terms

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

The ethical duty to protect client information, bounded by exceptions such as danger to self or others, suspected abuse, court orders, and written client authorization.

A legal and ethical obligation, triggered by credible serious threat to an identifiable person, to take reasonable steps such as warning the target or notifying authorities.

When a counselor holds another role with a client, a client's relative, or a person close to the client, creating risk of impaired judgment, exploitation, or harm.

A boundary crossing is a departure from customary practice that may be harmless or growth-promoting; a violation is a departure that exploits or harms the client.

Practicing only within the education, training, supervised experience, and credentials one holds, and seeking consultation or referral when a client's needs exceed that range.

A counselor's immersion in their own cultural assumptions, leading them to treat their worldview as universal and to misread culturally different clients' behavior.

A lifelong stance of self-reflection, openness to correction, and recognition of power differences that keeps the counselor a learner about each client's cultural experience.

Brief, commonplace verbal, behavioral, or environmental slights, whether intentional or not, that communicate hostile or demeaning messages to members of marginalized groups.

The idea that a person's overlapping social identities, such as race, gender, class, and disability, combine to produce experiences of privilege and oppression that cannot be understood separately.

A client's assumptions about how the world works and whether outcomes depend on personal action or outside forces; these shape problem attribution and preferred counseling goals.

The process of cultural change and adaptation that occurs when individuals or groups come into sustained contact with a different culture, ranging from separation to integration.

Stage models describing how members of minority and majority groups move from internalized dominant-culture views through conflict and immersion toward a secure, self-defined identity.

Eight lifespan stages, each pairing a developmental task with a crisis, such as trust versus mistrust in infancy or integrity versus despair in late adulthood.

Four stages of thinking from sensorimotor through preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational, marked by changing use of symbols, conservation, and abstract reasoning.

The gap between what a learner can do alone and what they can do with guidance from a more capable person, where instruction is most effective.

The view that early caregiver responsiveness shapes internal working models of self and others, producing secure, anxious, or avoidant patterns that influence later relationships.

A psychodynamic perspective holding that early relationships with caregivers are internalized as mental representations that shape later expectations, defenses, and relationship patterns.

A stage theory of moral reasoning moving from punishment avoidance and self-interest through conformity to social rules toward universal ethical principles.

A career theory matching six personality types, realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional, to work environments with similar demands.

A developmental career theory in which people move through growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, and disengagement stages while occupying multiple life roles.

The outcomes people seek from employment, such as income, autonomy, helping others, security, or recognition, which guide job choice and satisfaction.

A person's confidence in their ability to complete tasks needed to choose and pursue a career, such as gathering information and making plans.

The collaborative bond between counselor and client, joined with agreement on counseling goals and on the tasks used to reach them.

Accurately sensing a client's feelings and meanings from the client's frame of reference and communicating that understanding back to them.

A counselor's consistent, nonjudgmental acceptance of the client as a person, separate from approval or disapproval of specific behaviors.

Genuineness in which the counselor's outward communication matches their inner experience, without hiding behind a professional facade.

Transference is the client's projection of feelings from past relationships onto the counselor; countertransference is the counselor's emotional reactions to the client that may distort work.

A cognitive-behavioral technique in which clients identify distorted automatic thoughts, test them against evidence, and replace them with more accurate appraisals.

A structured approach that schedules meaningful activities to increase contact with rewarding experiences and reduce avoidance and depressive withdrawal.

Predictable phases a group passes through, commonly forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning, each with distinct member behavior and leader tasks.

The strength of members' attraction to the group and to one another, which supports attendance, risk-taking, and the therapeutic value of the group.

The leader's sharing of personal information or reactions, useful when brief and purposeful but risky when frequent, unfocused, or centered on the leader's needs.

Reliability is the consistency of scores across occasions or items; validity is the extent to which scores support the interpretations and decisions the test is used for.

An index of how much a person's observed score is expected to vary across repeated testing, used to build confidence intervals around a score.

Bias exists when test scores systematically mean different things for members of different groups; fairness concerns equitable use and consequences of score interpretation.

A procedure that calculates the probability of observed data, or more extreme data, assuming the null hypothesis is true, then compares it with a preset alpha level.

Effect size quantifies the magnitude of a difference or association; power is the probability of detecting a real effect of that size with a given sample.

Inquiry that gathers rich textual or observational data to understand meaning and context, often using interviews, focus groups, and thematic analysis rather than numerical hypothesis tests.

Systematic collection of information about a program's activities and outcomes to judge merit, improve services, or inform decisions by stakeholders.

The specified symptom, duration, distress, and impairment requirements a client must meet for a given disorder, along with exclusions and specifiers.

The process of comparing candidate conditions that share symptoms and ruling alternatives in or out using onset, course, and associated features.

A structured observation of appearance, behavior, speech, mood and affect, thought process and content, cognition, insight, and judgment used to describe current functioning.

A written, collaborative document naming the client's problems, measurable goals, chosen interventions, responsible parties, and a timeline for review.