by Henry McCarthy and Stephen J. Leierer, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center
Extensive research effort has been devoted to documentation and validation of the roles and functions of rehabilitation counselors (RCs) from the viewpoint of rehabilitation practitioners, educators, and supervisors. These investigations of what RCs do or should do have been based on either (a) criteria believed by academic researchers to be significant or (b) the practices of expert counselors who had been selected by their colleagues or supervisors. The client perspective on the counseling process, however, has been neglected by rehabilitation counseling researchers. This neglect is especially evident when compared to what has been published within the sister fields of family therapy, and psychotherapy. Indeed, this dearth of research stands in stark contrast to the importance of respecting and incorporating client input to the rehabilitation process, a value we have emphatically professed over the past four decades.