Professiographic Study of the Professional Activity of Counselling Psychologists

Background. According to VTsIOM, the demand for psychological services in the Russian Federation continues to increase along with the increase in the demand from the system of rendering psychological assistance to the population for training of competent specialists (counseling psychologists, educational psychologists, psychologists in emergency services, sports psychologists, psychologists for social and medical institutions). One of the key professional tasks of these specialists is to provide psychological counseling. At the moment, there is insufficient data in the literature on the psychological analysis of psychologists’ work activity related to the task of counseling.

Objective. The goals include: analyzing objective data on normative components of work for psychologists who carry out psychological counselling for the population; revealing subjective representations of counselling psychologists about the content and process of their professional activity; revealing stress-factors in the profession of counselling psychologist, based on the comparison of objective data on labor components and counselling psychologists’ subjective representations about their work.

Study Participants. 20 counselling psychologists who provide psychological counselling service to the population.

Methods. Document analysis, structured interview, analysis of professional standards, as well as labor method were applied.

Results. The obtained results reflect the matches and differences between objective requirements to the structure of labor activity realization and subjective representations of the specialists about the profession “psychologist”. These consistencies along with inconsistences were obtained in the process of analysis and comparison of the normative components of professional activity and subjective ideas of counselling psychologists about work. Stress factors in the work of consulting psychologists were identified.

Conclusions. The correspondence of objective requirements to normative components of work and subjective perceptions of normative components of work in the professional activity of counselling psychologists is revealed. The conducted analysis allows to make assumptions about the factors of professional stress in their work.

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