Ethical practice in counselling: Developing ethical standard for Bangladesh

Abstract

In Bangladesh, psychological counselling is a newly growing profession. Less population know about the necessity of practicing ethical behaviors and following ethical norms by the counsellors in psychological counselling. To ensure an authentic counselling service, maintaining ethical practice is mandatory for the professionals. As part of the process, ethical standards are needed to establish and follow in the context of Bangladesh. In this research, A Code of Ethics was developed which was justified by the expert panel. Four main categories; respect, competence, responsibility, and integrity were decided as ethical principles. Different applied field professionals’ opinions about the Code of Ethics and current ethical practice perspectives were gathered from the focus group discussion. From the Focus group discussion (FGD) it was revealed that licensing or professional registration process is needed to ensure counsellors’ ethical practice. Besides that, the expert panel put emphasis on competence of the counsellor in ethical practice. In the second part, an ethics and practice questionnaire was developed to measure the ethical practice of the counsellors. Moreover, the Client's Evaluation of Counselor Behavior (CECB-S) questionnaire was also used to identify the relationship between counsellors' competency and ethical practice. An online survey was used to collect data from the clients (N= 130) who have taken psychological counselling from the counsellor. Clients were asked to rate the counsellor’s ethical behaviors and competency in the counselling practice. From the Pearson correlation analysis, it was found that there is a very less positive correlation between counsellors’ competency and ethical practice in Bangladesh, and not significant. The Code of Ethics has developed as a basic guideline for counselling psychologists’, educational psychologists’, clinical psychologists’ as well as researchers. Further update and research are necessary to improve this Code.