Clinical supervision is integral to promoting the professional development of counselors-in-training and gatekeeping the counseling services provided by counselor trainees (Bernard & Goodyear, 2014). Despite the value of studying participants’ retrospective perceptions about or reflections upon supervision, the supervisory process in which supervision transpires is infrequently quantified and measured (Holloway, 1982; Holloway, 1987). As described by most developmental supervision models, clinical supervision is “a process with sequential and qualitatively distinct stages through which supervisors and trainees progress” (Littrell, Lee-Borden, & Lorenz, 1976, p. 134). In order to capture these stages and phenomena with observable and measurable units, the author used six states of interest to measure the supervision process, which exhibit the progressively complex nature of clinical supervision. The six states include: (a) social interfacing (non-skills phase), (b) reflecting on foundational competencies, (c) deepening case conceptualization, (d) processing the relational management, (e) overcoming personal and multicultural barriers, and (f) furthering professional development. These states underpin the codebook of this study and are used to conceptualize the supervision process.
Although the interactions between the supervisor and supervisee are transient and difficult to grasp, supervisory interactions move from one state to another. Indeed, state-transitional dynamics of clinical supervision are subject to a constellation of factors that supervisors and supervisees initially bring in and constantly reinforce, such as supervisory styles, supervisee developmental levels, supervisory working alliance, and supervisee satisfaction with clinical supervision. By using Markov chain analysis, this study detects the overall transitional dynamics of supervisory dyads and investigates how transitional dynamics vary based on the aforementioned variables that manifest themselves as supervision dynamics unfold and closely interface with other supervision variables. Results of this study provide implications for clinical supervisors, counselor educators, and counselors-in-training.