The need for a new journal dealing with group psychology and group psychotherapy was documented for the Publications & Communications Board of the American Psychological Association. The authors examined the output characteristics of existing journals that published articles about groups and group work between 1980 and 1995. Although articles about groups were published in 1,042 journals, 35% of the group articles were published in 23 journals. Although the 23 journals seemed to provide thorough coverage of general and specific aspects of group dynamics and group interventions, including psychodrama, few journals attempted to integrate diverse topics in group dynamics and group intervention. Trends in the number and kinds of topics published were also examined across the 16-year interval. The main implications of this survey were that (a) the study of groups, as reflected by the rate and number of publications, is a central concern in various fields in psychology and mental health; (b) researchers' and practitioners' publications dealing with group-level topics are distributed widely across many diverse journals, which makes it difficult for group psychologists to keep abreast of the literature; and (c) a single journal is needed to provide a focal point for basic and applied studies of groups.

This study represents a systematic method of arriving at the cognitive and experiential training needs of the group counselor. Proposed behavioral objectives were rated and added to by experts in group counseling through a method of successive questionnaires—a modified Delphi technique. The ratings of the second questionnaire were used to analyze the value of the objectives and the agreement of the experts. The most highly rated cognitive and experiential objectives are presented in tabular form.

A pretest-posttest control group design was used to test the value of employing four psychotherapeutic interaction scales for selfevaluation. The counselor-offered conditions of empathy, nonpossessive warmth, genuineness, and intensity of interpersonal contact were self-evaluated by 44 counselors following their counseling interviews. These evaluations were compared with supervisors' evaluations of the tape recorded sessions. Findings showed that (a) the gain in offered therapeutic conditions was significant on all scales for the experimental group but on only two scales for the control group; (b) the amount of gain for the experimental group was significantly higher than that of the control group on only one scale ( Empathy) ; ( c ) counselor / supervisor evaluations showed highly Significant concurrent validity; and (d) basic counselor personality orientations such as self-concept strength and defensiveness generally showed no correlation with accuracy of self-evaluation on the scales.

The Organizational and Political Issues Group focused on managerial, structural, and political issues in counseling psychology. Papers were presented by 11 counseling psychologists on 13 basic issues that had been identified by the planning

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