Supervisor’s and Supervisee’s Views on Professional Supervision

Abstract

This study is devoted to the expectations of supervisors and supervisees of the supervision process and their vision of the successful and unsuccessful supervision. We developed two questionnaires: one for the supervisor and other for the supervisee . A total of 103 respondents with various occupational experiences participated in the study, including 85 females and 10 males, and 8 respondents did not indicate gender. The age of the participants ranged from 22 to 61 years, with an average age of 38.92±11.22 years. The methods of statistical processing are: the principal component method with oblimin rotation, ANOVA. The results show that supervisee identifies three components of supervision process — knowledge, developing a professional identity and focusing on the client, while the supervisor considers all these aspects of the work to be complementary and inseparable from each other. The supervisor's expectations of the supervision differ from the supervisee's expectations, and these differences must be taken into account in education. Four factors (training, understanding/support, ethics, and novelty) are identified in supervisee’s expectations from the supervisor. The more experienced the supervisee is the less he focuses on gaining specific knowledge and techniques, and more on understanding his client. Work experience also helps to develop criteria for unsuccessful supervision — they are unambiguous and consolidated. Noteworthy the criteria for good supervision are not revealed. That means that the options for successful supervision are diverse, unlike unsuccessful supervision.

Keywords

• professional supervision
• work experience
• training in practical psychology