This study provided administrators in a large southern metropolitan public school district an opportunity to participate in a stress-related research study. The questionnaire contained such stress-related probe areas as spiritual beliefs, preferred and imposed (perceived) orders of major-life emphasis areas, professional environment, personal-social environment, and probes into the ethical positions held by the administrators. The professional environment section contained subsets of internal (on-the-job) probes, external (political) probes, as well as personal (incentive) probes.The personal-social environment section was sub-divided into five Maslow hierarchy-of-need related probes such as physiological needs, safety-security needs, social needs, esteem needs, and self-fulfillment needs. The final section of the instrument sampled the administrators' responses to probes concerning their concepts of God, their concepts of the Bible arid their positions on eight ethical statements.

Among the social sciences, guidance is relatively young, having evolved out of the American social experience with its concern for the welfare of the individual. As an independent discipline, guidance is about seventy years old. However, the foundations for guidance are imbedded in the nation's historical past. Beginning with seventeenth-century New Englanders, who stressed religious and economic reasoning, a systematic approach to occupational selection began. By the close of the colonial period, the precedent of freedom of choice of vocation and educational opportunity was well established.