Resources of the meaning of life in counseling students: A qualitative study

Human life represents a lifelong endeavor to seek and construct meaning. This basic dimension of existence is present every day in the process of working with people in auxiliary professions and challenges therapists to think seriously about the meaning of their lives. Accordingly, the present study was conducted with the aim of identifying the components and sources of meaning of life in counseling students. This qualitative research was performed by interpretive phenomenological method. The study population included all postgraduate counseling students at Allameh Tabatabai University in the winter of 1399. Participants were selected using purposive sampling logic and snowball method and sampling was continued until information saturation. Finally, 14 subjects (11 girls and 3 boys) were studied through semi-structured interviews. Data analysis was performed using Van Mann's 6-step content analysis method. From the data analysis, 36 sub-themes, 7 main themes and one core theme were obtained. At the a sense of meaning in the lives of the participants. Also, some of them did not achieve significant coherence in the meaningful elements of life, which led to the emergeironmental factors in the context of "environmental determinants" expressedfe. According to the findings, the meaning of life includes many components and resources in counseling students, in which their helping profession has a lot of intervention. Also, sometimes contradictory concepts such as the lack of a stable value system and ing of life, indicate the evolving, fluid and dynamic meaning of life in this group, which is a growth task throughout their working life.