Therapists' feelings of incompetence : a grounded theory analysis of experienced clinicians
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Feelings of incompetence are an ongoing part of the private experience of being a therapist. Although normative, they are often linked to therapist stress, distress, and to negative therapeutic processes and outcomes. Yet systematic inquiries into the subjective judgment of oneself as inadequate and incompetent in the role of therapist are virtually nonexistent and even more rare for experienced therapists. A qualitative approach was used in this study to obtain rich descriptions of therapists' encounters with feelings of incompetence. Eight therapists with ten years of experience or more were recruited for the study. Guided by a semi-structured interview protocol, they were interviewed for ninety minutes. The resulting transcripts were analysed with procedures based on grounded theory methodology (Strauss & Corbin, 1992). Results indicated that feelings of incompetence existed on a spectrum of intensity and that the experience was multiply determined. A dynamic, pan-theoretical, and multidimensional theory of feelings of incompetence is presented. The substantive theory summarises the relationship between the main categories of nature and depth of self-doubt, sources, consequences, and mediating factors. These categories are organised around the core category of intensity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".