Can you tell the difference between a new and a qualifying trainee counsellor based on how they describe counselling?

This data set relates to a research project where we wanted to find out if counsellor development is shown linguistically in the ways that trainees describe counselling at the beginning and end of their training. The dataset includes responses from an anonymous questionnaire administered to a group of new trainee counsellors (N=21) and to a separate group of qualifying trainee counsellors (N=16). Using the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC), which analyses and compares word use to reveal psychological and linguistic characteristics, we analysed this dataset and found that qualifying trainee counsellors are more confident, embody the counsellor persona more comfortably, have a broader counselling vocabulary, and have higher cognitive complexity in how they describe the function of counselling. The data is in the form of two excel spreadsheets containing different rows. First are the rows with the questions from an anonymous questionnaire, from 1-8 and then are the rows of participant answers to those questions (N=21 and N=16 for new and qualifying trainee counsellors respectively).