Ito Naoki    Department   Undergraduate School  , School of Arts and Letters    Position   Professor
Date	2017/08/18
Presentation Theme	Counselor attitudes toward using the SNSs of university counseling centers in Japan
Conference	2017 Annual Conference of the Korean Psychological Association
Promoters	Korean Psychological Association
Conference Type	Domestic
Presentation Type	Poster
Contribution Type	Individual
Venue	Seoul
Details	Objective: Following recent developments in information technology, nearly all university students now have mobile phones and communicate with each other using SNSs (Facebook, Twitter, LINE, and the like).However, most university counseling centers in Japan do not utilize SNSs. This is due to Japanese counselors' attitudes toward using SNS. However, no research regarding this problem has been conducted in Japan. The present study investigated attitudes of Japanese university counselors toward using SNSs and factors that influenced these attitudes. Methods: An original questionnaire was sent to 749 university counseling centers in Japan. This questionnaire comprised items about the type of university installation, the size of the university, the number of counselors, the number and rate of students visiting the counseling centers, the number of counselors who can update websites, the degree of websites use, and the attitudes toward using SNSs. Results: In total, 305 counseling centers (40.7%) responded. Excluding the responses with missing values, the answers of 174 centers (23.2%) were included in final analysis. Factor analysis was conducted on items concerning attitudes toward using SNSs, and three factors were found. These were "using SNSs actively," "fear about risks of SNSs," and "anxiety about manipulation of SNSs."Three subscales were constructed from these factors and the scores of each subscale were calculated. The average scores of "using SNSs actively" were not particularly high while those of "fear about risks of SNSs" and "anxiety about manipulation of SNSs" were very high. Next, correlations between the scores of these three subscales, the number of counselors, the number and the rate of students visiting counseling centers, and scores of actively using websites were calculated.There were very few pairs found to be statistically significant, and many of the absolute values of correlations were small. However, there were statistically significant relations between the scores of these subscales (high score group or not) and the type of university installation, the size of university, and the existence of counselors who updated websites. Public universities showed active attitudes toward using SNSs, but private universities did not. National universities and universities that had counselors who could update websites had a tendency to have relatively lower "fear about risks of SNSs." These findings provide new insights into present situations and issues relating to university counseling centers in Japan.