The Ethics of Psychological Counseling: A Comparative Study of Chinese Certified Psychological Counselors and American Psychological Counselors

Abstract

The present study has been designed to investigate and to compare the attitudes and beliefs of a sample of Chinese and a sample of American psychological counselors toward ethicalness of a range of counseling behaviors. It is hoped that the obtained findings would (1) provide some guidance to the psychological counselors, both in China and in the U.S., as to how to behave when confronted with such behaviors, and (2) aid the Chinese Psychological Society and the Chinese psychological counselors specifically, in the revision and extension of the existing Chinese psychological counseling ethics codes. The study’s data were obtained from a sample of 402 Chinese certified psychological counselors currently practicing in China. Data from the American sample were obtained from the Gibson and Pope’s (1993) nationwide survey conducted in the United States. The study’s comparative results showed that there are significant differences between Chinese and American counselors in (1) the frequency of occurrence of ethical issues in their counseling practices, (2) their assessment of certain counseling behaviors as ethical or unethical, and (3) their confidence when assessing certain counseling behaviors as ethical or unethical. These findings are discussed in terms of the cultural and developmental differences between Chinese and American counselors.