NBCC NCE-ABE Online Access

In the Social and Cultural Diversity core area, counselors are expected to demonstrate multicultural competence, including the ability to broach topics such as race, ethnicity, culture, oppression, identity, and power dynamics.

Broaching is the counselor’s intentional effort to:

Acknowledge and invite discussion of cultural and sociopolitical factors affecting the client,

Normalize and validate the significance of the client’s cultural identities, and

Address how these factors may shape the counseling relationship and presenting concerns.

Best practice is for broaching to occur early and repeatedly:

It should be introduced in the first session to set a foundation that cultural and identity-related issues are welcome topics.

It should continue throughout the counseling process, as relevance may change or deepen over time.

Limiting broaching to referral considerations (A) or only when a client formally requests it (B) contradicts multicultural counseling competencies, which emphasize counselor responsibility.

Doing it only by the second session and at termination (C) makes it infrequent and procedural, rather than an ongoing part of the relationship.

Thus, broaching is implemented in the first session and throughout counseling, making D the correct answer.

Within the Assessment and Testing core area, counselors are expected to distinguish between screening instruments and diagnostic assessments.

The SASSI-4 (Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory) is a screening tool, not a diagnostic instrument. It:

Uses both face-valid (obvious) and subtle items.

Classifies individuals into categories indicating the likelihood (probability) of having a substance use disorder.

Ethically and professionally, screening tools such as the SASSI-4 are used to:

Identify those with a high probability of SUD,

Guide decisions about further assessment or referral,

But not to independently confirm a diagnosis.

Therefore, the results indicate the probability that a person has a substance use disorder, making D correct.

Within Human Growth and Development, counselors are trained to understand how individuals adapt and sometimes grow in response to trauma. Post-traumatic growth is conceptualized not merely as “positive thinking,” but as a process and outcome in which people:

Engage in adaptive coping after trauma,

Do meaning making about what happened,

Experience personal growth (e.g., deeper relationships, new life priorities, greater appreciation of life).

Option B captures this standard definition: it emphasizes both process (coping and meaning making) and outcome (personal growth) following traumatic experiences.

Options A, C, and D are incomplete or overly simplistic—focusing on theory labels or “positivity” rather than the well-established process/outcome framework used in counseling literature and CACREP-aligned training.

Within the Research and Program Evaluation core area, counselors are expected to understand how different research designs relate to questions of causality. Experimental designs are identified as the primary method for examining cause–effect relationships because they:

Use manipulation of an independent variable

Include control or comparison groups

Often use random assignment to reduce bias

Descriptive and correlational designs can show associations or describe variables but cannot establish causation because they do not control for alternative explanations in the same way. Therefore, consistent with CACREP’s emphasis on understanding experimental methods as the standard for testing causal hypotheses, the correct answer is D. An experimental design.