Professor
Department of Psychology
Iowa State University
Ames, IA - 50010

Education:
University of Missouri - Columbia, Ph.D., 1986
University of Missouri - Columbia, MS, 1984


Research Interests:

One of my areas of interest is the vocational arena whereby I am interested in how vocational interests are driven by personality. Moreover, I am interested in the relationship of self-efficacy and outcome expectancies in predicting important vocational and educational outcome variables like career choice, persistence in college, career major, and educational aspirations. These interests have spilled over into my work with undergraduate and graduate students as well as my colleague, Fred Borgen. Collectively, we have number of projects that are in various stages of completion. More importantly we have fun and get excited about ideas that impact, we hope, working with people concerning their career and educational plans.

A second area of interest for me is in the counselor training area. I am fundamentally interested in understanding how someone becomes effective in their work with clients. What do supervisors and supervisees need to pay attention to. I have adapted Bandura’s social cognitive theory to counselor training in a major contribution theoretical article published in March of 1998 in the Counseling Psychologist. The entire issue is devoted to presenting a review of counseling self-efficacy, presenting the Social Cognitive Model of Counselor Training, and the four reviewers critique the model, and I follow up with a reaction paper. This issue provides the theoretical foundation for my work in this area. In the beginning of my career, I developed a counseling self-efficacy measure called the Counseling Self-Estimate Inventory (Larson et al., 1992). Since the conceptual paper in 1998, I have continued to slowly build an empirical base developing valid measures of the constructs in the model and then preceding to examine their relationships empirically. This work continues to challenge and excite me.