Evaluation of Psychology students regarding the ethics of some therapist practices

Before beginning the Practicum (professional training), 191 Psychology students (158 female and 33 male) completed the Spanish version of Pope, Tabachnick and Keith-Spiegel (1987) questionnaire. This includes 83 specific therapist behaviors covering a wide range of topic areas. Participants were instructed to rate the extent to which they consider each behavior ethical, and were given the same likert-scale used by original study: “Unquestionably no”, “Ethical under rare circumstances”, “Don’t know/not sure”, “Under any circumstances” and “Unquestionably yes”. In this study, the beliefs of professionals (previous study: Pope et al., 1987) and Psychology student (current study) regarding the ethicality of therapist behaviors were compared. For about two-thirds of the 83 behaviors studied, our results differed significantly from the previous study, in a higher number, the answers of our participants more in agreement with the ethical principles. Nevertheless, in the current study, there were 23 behaviors that posed difficult judgments in terms of whether they were ethical (more than 20% responded “Don’t know/not sure”) compared with 12 of original study. Implications of these results are discussed.