Experience of Graduate Counseling Students During COVID-19: Application for Group Counseling Training

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in many universities moving abruptly from face-to-face to online instruction. One group of students involved in this transition was master’s-level counseling students. Their experiential group counseling training (EGCT) program started in a face-to-face format and abruptly transitioned to an online format because of COVID-19. In this phenomenological study, we examined these students’ experiences of participating and leading in six face-to-face and four online EGCT groups. Two focus groups were conducted, and three major themes emerged: positive participation attributes, participation-inhibiting attributes, and suggestions for group counseling training. The findings point to additional learning and skill development through the online group experience as well as its utility as a safe space to process the novel experience brought about by COVID-19.

Revealing Developers’ Arguments on Validating the Incidence of Code Smells: A Focus Group Experience

Identifying code smells is considered a subjective task. Unfortunately, current automated detection tools cannot deal with such subjectivity, requiring human validation. Developers tend to follow different, albeit complementary, strategies when validating the identified smells. Intending to find out developers' arguments when validating the incidence of code smells, we conducted a focus group session with developers familiar with identifying code smells. We distributed them among two groups, in which they had to argue about the incidence of a code smell: either accepting or rejecting its presence. Based on their arguments, we compiled a set of general heuristics that developers follow when validating smells. We then used these heuristics for composing validation items. We understand that the set of validation items proposed may support developers in reflecting on the incidence of code smells. However, further studies are needed for reaching a more comprehensive and optimized set. The experience of this study reveals that conducting focus group sessions is helpful to emerge the tacit knowledge of developers when validating code smells.

PERCEIVED INTERCONNECTEDNESS AND THE DEPENDENCE ON AMBIENT CONTEXT ON TWITTER DURING ELECTIONS

In this paper, I explore the role of ambient context in the encoding and decoding of election tweets and the ways these tweets signal perceived affective interconnectedness between users. I particularly explore the tweets by Turkish microcelebrities that do not make sense outside of a transient context and thus rely on the ambient context provided by shared online or offline experiences. These tweets include reactions or responses to TV interviews, news reports, rallies and so on. In scholarly works, similar tweets have been mainly observed within hashtagged datasets where the hashtag provides the necessary context. Building on Abidin’s (2015) account on perceived interconnectedness as a performance of intimacy between influencers and followers, I analyse such tweets as signifiers of affective interconnectedness that reinforce a ‘feeling of community’ (Dean, 2010). Thus, I argue that during political events, for Twitter microcelebrities, affect, as in, manifestations of experienced emotions (Papacharissi, 2012), replaces other strategies of intimacy in building these bonds. Political events create an environment where intimacy is capitalized to reinforce affective experiences and is simultaneously generated through them. Understanding the subtext in these affective expressions imply a degree of togetherness between the microcelebrity and the follower, a shared, in-group experience that relies on an existing familiarity and reinforces the intimacy between them.

IPV Perpetrator Groups: Client Engagement, and the Role of Facilitators

Based on the emerging literature being developed in Motivational Interviewing that suggests certain group process factors and facilitator attributes predict treatment outcomes, this study sought to investigate the relationship between both client and facilitator ratings of the batterer intervention group experience. This study presents data from 16 group facilitators drawn from five agencies and 175 clients being served by these facilitators. The data gathered included both facilitator ratings of clients (i.e., Group Engagement Measure-GEM) and client ratings of facilitators and the group experience (i.e., Client Rating of Facilitator-CRF, Client Perceived Benefits of Group-CPBG). Results indicate that facilitators rated clients as being engaged in the group process across all the domains assessed by the GEM and that clients viewed the facilitators and group experiences favorably as assessed by the CRF and CPBG. There was no significant correlation between the GEM and CRF or the GEM and CPBG, but there was a strong, positive correlation between the CRF and CPBG. The results here support previous research findings suggesting a strong correlation between client engagement in the therapeutic process, based on their perception of the facilitator, and their perceived benefits of the group experience. Implications of the findings for improving empirical investigations of the batterer intervention group experience were explored and discussed.