EMPOWERMENT AS A COUNSELING CONSTRUCT
The purpose of this paper is to examine the construct of "empowerment" as it is used in both the theoretical and empirical counseling literature. The paper begins with a brief general definition of empowerment and a discussion of its importance to the field of counseling. This is followed by an examination of the various meanings attached to the term as it is used in the theoretical literature.
The next section of the paper explores the meanings given to the term empowerment in the empirical counseling literature as well as how the term is operationalized from study to study. The final section of the paper presents a series of conclusions derived from an overall critique of the use of the term empowerment in both the conceptual and empirical literature.
According to Peterson and Nisenholz (1994), in its most general sense, the term "empowerment" is used in counseling to refer to assisting an individual and or social collective (e.g., group counseling) to overcome either innate or societal factors contributing to their experiencing a psychoemotional and/or psychosocial disadvantage with respect to the rest of society. For example, if a counselor was facilitating a gay support group, the empowerment goal would be to overcome psychoemotional and psychosocial disadvantages associated with being gay in a basically homophobic society. On the other hand, if the counselor was working with an individual who was a member of a minority group, the empowerment goal would be to overcome psychoemotional and psychosocial disadvantages associated with discrimination arising from the client's ethnic/racial background.
In still other instances, the client may have been physically or sexually abused as a child and the consequences of this abuse could have been the development of a neurosis or a personality disorder. In this sense then, empowerment would be viewed in terms of helping the client ove...