Contemporary Ethical Issues in Counselling: A Dimensional Trend Analysis

Abstract

There are faces of ethical issues in counselling relationships for which contributors to knowledge frequently lays hands on. When researchers look in to ethics their initiative is to discover the extent to which the practicing behaviors’ adhere to the ethical codes governing the counselling profession. This current study provides answers to the; adherence rate to ethical issues for school counsellors and health counsellors, the counsellors overall adherence rate to ethical issues, and the trend by year of articles publication regarding confidentiality and friendliness, all during 2007 – 2021. The purpose of this study was to examine the trends and adherence to ethics confined to confidentiality and friendliness among counsellors in counselling relationships published in selected counselling and other psychotherapeutic related journal articles during the period of 2007 – 2021. Dimensional trend analysis was used to investigate the psychotherapeutic articles published online, all which are related to ethical issues in counselling. A total of 108 articles were used as samples all which are relevant to the purpose of this study. The analysis of the result showed counsellors generally adhere to ethics in the discharge of their services, specifically school counsellors are found to keep with confidentiality and friendliness higher than the health counsellors do. Analysis revealed that, adherence to ethics was found to be 74.07%. Regarding the trend by year of publication, 2019 was found the least in research article publication, adjudged due to COVID 19 trauma. The years 2020 and 2021 were found to have a rise in publications above all the other years except the year 2010 which investigated to be the highest in term of scholarly article publications. It is concluded that articles publications trend do not consistently surpass one another annually.