Twenty Years of Practitioner Training in Psychology
By: Donald R. Peterson
School of Professional Psychology, Rutgers University
Twenty years ago, Adrien Pinard, president of the Canadian Psychological Association, concluded his address to the Association as follows:
I shall limit myself to summarizing in three propositions the tissue of commonplaces which make up the thread of my address. In the first place, I have called attention to the paradox that arises from the fact that the very large majority of psychologists are practitioners, while the model generally applied to the training of these practitioners is the scientist-professional model, a model essentially centered on scientific research. In the second place, I have tried to show that the generalization of this model is illusory and dangerous. It is first of all illusory because our so-called scientist-professionals, with the exception of a deluxe minority, are in reality either scientists who do not practice their profession or practitioners who do no research and who, by their own admission, are not even in a fit state to exercise their profession well. It is also dangerous, because the scientist-professional model cannot satisfy the multitude of psychological services rightly demanded by the public, and because this model is a source of confusion and in fact deprives professional psychology of the very identity the model was supposed to give it. In the third place, I have proposed the institution of two different courses of psychological training, an academic course and a professional course specifying that these programs must both be at the doctoral level and must demand comparable requirements and be at the same time distinct and complementary. (Pinard, 1967, pp 144–145).
In his talk, Pinard expressed some common concerns of his time. Following recommendations of the Boulder Conference (Raimy, 1950), scientist-practitioner programs for educating professional psychologists were located in academic departments. Everyone who applauded that decision believed that the academic environment would provide the culture of scholarship required for a newly formed profession. Few foresaw, however, the extent to which research would come to dominate American universities in the years following World War II. When I was in graduate school at the University of Minnesota, the chair of the department was Richard M. Elliott, a scholar of great wisdom who deepened the knowledge and extended the vision of every student he touched. Elliott published practically nothing except a book called The Sunny Side of Asia, which he wrote after a walking tour of China. Today I cannot imagine a person with Elliott's qualifications receiving a faculty appointment at any rank in any major university. Shortly after I came to the University of Illinois, the director of our psychological clinic, a man who had done a great deal to organize services and was the chief practicum supervisor in the clinic but had published only two articles in his life, was promoted from associate to full professor. He would not stand a chance for promotion today.
The shifts in values that required productive scholarship of every professor were well advanced by 1964. As the emphasis on research grew stronger and stronger, the appreciation of mere reflective scholarship, good teaching, and humane public service declined. No longer could faculty in the most ambitious departments devote long hours to teaching or clinical supervision, to the neglect of research, and hope for promotion. No longer could students declare interest solely in practice and hope for admission to the best graduate programs. Yet most students who completed scientist-practitioner programs published no research. And few felt well prepared for the professional work they would spend their lives doing.
The titles of the following journal articles revealed the tensions of the time: “The Case of Clinical Psychology: A Search for Identity” (Kahn & Santostefano, 1962); “Psychology in Flux: The Academic-Professional Bipolarity” (Tryon, 1963); “The Crisis in Clinical Psychology Training” (Blank & David, 1963). In 1964, the American Psychological Association's (APA) ad hoc Committee on the Scientific and Professional Aims of Psychology, with Kenneth E. Clark as chair, was concluding its deliberations. The committee recommended a two-track system of education, one for researchers and one for practitioners (APA, 1967). The Chicago Conference, remembered today mainly for its reaffirmation of the scientist-practitioner model of professional education, was only a year away, and preconference materials had already been distributed to participants (Hoch, Ross, & Winder, 1966). In Canada, similar activities were in progress. The address by Pinard (quoted in the beginning of this article) was one of the position pa-pers for the Couchiching Conference on Professional Psychology. There, in 1965, most of the same issues that preoccupied the Chicago Conference were addressed, and most of the same conclusions were reached (Webster, 1967). Although the academicians who dominated both conferences were willing to consider minor modulations of program philosophy, they did not agree that any fundamental change was needed. Instead, they congratulated themselves for doing what they had been doing and went back to continue business as before.
But neither articles, committees, nor conferences could solve the basic problems of the time. Many scientist-practitioner programs emphasized science so strongly that practice was not only neglected but disparaged. Most programs were tiny. In California, for example, at a time when the general population was increasing rapidly, when California society was in crisis over rural and urban problems alike, and mental health systems were expanding to proportions never seen before in this country, all the California universities combined were turning out fewer than 20 clinical psychologists per year. The public demand for competent practitioners was strong. The demand from students for access to the profession was growing strident. Demands from practitioners, who faced hopelessly unmanageable case loads, who were dissatisfied with their own training, and who saw no help available from the universities, grew more militant and better organized. University faculties, sure in their commitments to science and fundamentally preoccupied with their own concerns, did not respond to the pressures. The dam was bound to break.
The early stages of the practitioner movement in psychology have been chronicled elsewhere (Caddy & LaPointe, 1984; Dörken & Cummings, 1977; Peterson, 1982). Only a bare summary is needed here. In 1964, only one program in the country was devoted mainly to the education of practitioners in psychology. That was the program at Adelphi University. In 1965, the Fuller Graduate School of Psychology was established. The Illinois Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) program began in 1968. In 1969, the California School of Professional Psychology accepted its first class of students. Since then, the number of practitioner programs has risen sharply. By 1982, 44 practitioner programs were in O p e r ation, with 4,992 students enrolled (Caddy & LaPointe, 1984). Of the 44 programs, 20 are in universities, and 24 are in freestanding professional schools. Twenty-seven programs lead to the PsyD degree, and 17 to the PhD.
The growth curve shown in Figure 1 appears to be rising relentlessly, but there is reason to suppose that the increase in new programs will soon taper off. Unaccredited freestanding schools do not attract students as they once did, and the job market for graduates seems weaker than it was a few years ago. As any dean of an independent school of professional psychology will attest, development of a new school requires tremendous effort. It seems likely that most of the people interested in forming new schools have either already done so or given up. Some growth of PsyD programs will probably take place in small psychology departments in the years ahead, but the period of rapid increase in practitioner programs appears to be ending. Over the past 20 years, the professional school and the professional doctorate have become established in American psychology. What have we learned from the experience?
Figure 1. Increase in Practitioner Programs From 1960 to 1982
1. Major research universities will not establish practitioner programs in psychology. The Doctor of Psychology program at the University of Illinois failed. By now, the main reasons are clear. To the Illinois faculty, education for practice was never considered less demanding than education for research. It was always seen as equally demanding and in some ways more so. Specialization is justifiable and necessary for research. A practitioner facing problems as they come from the public must be comprehensively trained. Preparing students not only for individual assessment and psychotherapy but also for a wide range of other skills, from neuropsychology to community intervention, requires an enormous investment of training resources. In the Illinois conception, especially as it developed after I left, professional psychologists were expected to contribute scholarly knowledge, if not scientific facts, to the discipline. The projects chosen by PsyD students were often more difficult than those elected by PhD students, but demands for thoroughness and all possible rigor were not relaxed. By 1980, when the PsyD program was discontinued, the median time to completion was 7.4 years. Despite efforts by the Illinois faculty to describe the program accurately, many students entered dreaming of careers in the private practice of individual psychotherapy. They were annoyed by requirements that did not serve their personal goals and unsettled by faculty attitudes that attached little value to direct service through long-term individual treatment. They were not stupid. Why should they spend 7.4 years learning things they did not want to learn to obtain a PsyD when they could spend 5 years learning some other things they did not want to learn and get a PhD?
For faculty, the burdens of the program became too heavy to bear. Supervisory help from the local professional community did not materialize as expected. The task of clinical supervision fell mainly to full-time faculty, but in the research culture of the university time devoted to clinical supervision yielded few rewards. Many of the faculty had believed all along that a scientist-professional model of education, flexibly managed, could serve the aims of research and practice alike. Over the course of many discussions, that was the model to which they returned.
Despite the encouragement of practitioner programs by the Vail Conference (Korman, 1976) few were attempted in research universities, and those that were proposed have rarely been sustained. An inte**culty program in clinical psychology and public practice ran for several years at Harvard but was put into moratorium when some of the administrators involved found it too expensive and too heavily ridden with conflict to merit continuation. The current program in counseling and consulting psychology at Harvard is housed in the Graduate School of Education. The Yale faculty endorsed the idea of explicit professional programs and the Doctor of Psychology degree, but neither the money nor the faculty commitment required to develop a professional program are in prospect, and the program in effect there is still a PhD program in clinical and community psychology. Twenty years ago, Paul Meehl returned from the meetings of the Clark committee (APA, 1967) and presented the argument for outright professional education to Minnesota psychologists, but only a few of the other University of Minnesota faculty members supported the idea, and Meehl saw no point in pressing it. Later, a PsyD program in health psychology was formally proposed by clinical psychologists in the medical school, but conflicts with a new administration in the Department of Psychiatry precluded attention to any new developments in psychology. At this time, the proposal is dormant and not likely to be revived.
At New York University (NYU), a PsyD program in clinical psychology was proposed informally as early as 1957. In the 1970s, a formal proposal was approved by the Psychology Department, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University Committee of Deans, and the Board of Trustees. At the last moment, the proposal was defeated by the clinical faculty, most of whom objected to the central role adjunct faculty were to have in the professional program. A PsyD program in school psychology was later established at NYU, but prospects for a parallel program in clinical psychology are remote.
These are anecdotes, but others could be told. Together they form a consistent pattern. The fact is that only three of the 44 practitioner programs in the country are in major research universities, as that term is defined by the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education (1976). These are at Rutgers, Yeshiva University, and NYU. The other universities with professional programs, such as Adelphi, Baylor, Wright State, and Denver, are not considered major research universities by the standards of the Carnegie Council, whatever the faculties may think about their reputations. The Carnegie rating system further divides research universities into Class I and Class II. Harvard, Stanford, Yale, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley, along with other universities all would recognize, appear in the top group. A large share of the Class I research universities do not even have scientist-professional programs in psychology, let alone programs for training practitioners. There is a very good reason for this. The primary mission of the first class research university is research, not so much education and service, and the faculty in those institutions cannot afford to spend their time supervising practitioners in a minor profession.
For the most part, the major research universities of America have retained small, research-oriented scientist-professional programs in psychology. With only three exceptions, efforts to develop practitioner programs in research universities have failed. Given the incentives that govern faculty behavior, there is no reason to expect these conditions to change.
2. Education of most practitioners in psychology will take place in professional schools and small departments. Although graduates of scientist-professional programs in research universities are usually qualified to practice, the emphasis in those programs is on research, and the programs are very small. At this time, the number of students enrolled in university-based scientist-practitioner programs and the number enrolled in professional schools appear to be about equal. As the new professional schools produce more graduates and as more practitioner programs are established in small departments, the numerical balance in the production of professional psychologists will clearly shift to practitioner programs.
Incentives for developing professional programs in small departments are substantial. Many departments already have master's programs in O p e r ation, but graduates of those programs face an uncertain job market. Faculties generally prefer doctoral programs to master's programs for the gain in intellectual stimulation and prestige doctoral programs provide. Universities in which the departments are located often have no doctoral programs in any field, and so administrators are likely to support efforts to elevate their institutions into the class of universities that grant doctoral degrees. Doctor of Psychology programs in universities attract students, graduates gain employment, and all the university-based PsyD programs that have applied for APA accreditation so far have been approved. These conditions are likely to favor development of more PsyD programs in small departments in the years ahead.
This worries me. Programs in professional psychology are not only not developing in the first rank of American universities, they are not developing in the second rank either. Professional programs are not seen at the University of Michigan but at Central Michigan University, not at Florida State University but at Nova, not at Columbia but at Pace University, not at Indiana University but at Indiana State University, not at the University of Kentucky but at Spalding College, not at the State University of Pennsylvania but at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, not at the University of Virginia but at George Mason University.
The Conference Board of Associated Research Councils (CBARC) recently published a report on the scholarly reputations of universities (CBARC, 1983). If ratings of “faculty quality” in that survey are distributed and the positions of practitioner programs in psychology are noted, some interesting facts stand out. The first, already mentioned above, is that professional training in psychology has been abandoned entirely by many of the most prestigious universities. The psychology departments at Stanford, Harvard, Chicago, Princeton, and Northwestern Universities, all of which appear in the top quartile of the CBARC ratings, do not offer training for practice at all. The second fact is that those institutions that do offer direct education for practice do not fare well by the usual standards of faculty scholarship. Among 29 members, associates, and affiliates of the National Council of Schools of Professional Psychology (NCSPP), only one appears in the top quartile on the CBARC scale. One other is in the third quartile. Seven are in the bottom quartile. Twenty of the NCSPP members, who are training many if not most of tomorrow's practitioners, are not listed at all as qualified to educate scholars.
Conditions for access to the profession have changed radically since professional schools started to admit large numbers of students. Established professional schools that took part in a recent survey (Callan, Peterson, & Stricker, in press) enrolled an average of 49 new students per year (Stricker, in press). This is at least five times larger than typical entering classes in academic departmental programs. Not only are the numbers of students enrolling in professional schools larger than our field has known before, but the selection ratios are also different. Scientist-practitioner programs in prestigious universities receive several hundred applications per year. Some receive more; selection ratios of 1:100 are not unknown, and ratios of 1:15 are not uncommon. Standards for admission are still severe in most university-based professional schools, but freestanding schools admit higher proportions of applicants. The 12 independent schools that took part in the Callan et al. survey invited an average of 46% of applicants to enter their programs. Selection ratios ranged from about 1:3 to 2:3.
I have visited many schools of professional psychology and several small departments that are starting practitioner programs. The faculties usually impress me as bright, sincere, energetic people, dedicated to the education of professional psychologists in a scholarly way. Few are famous scientists. What this condition and the others mentioned above will do to our field is difficult to say, but it will not be the same as it was before.
3. The doctoral degree granted upon completion of graduate study depends on the administrative location of the program in which graduate study is done. Arguments about the proper degree for professional psychologists have been running on for many years. Those who support the PhD claim that it offers greater prestige than a professional degree and is more fitting because practitioners in psychology are really scholar-professionals (Derner, 1959; Stricker, 1975; Weins, 1983). Those who support the PsyD claim that it can be controlled by psychology as the PhD cannot and that it can be employed to certify professional competence in psychology as the PhD cannot (Fox, Barclay, & Rogers, 1982; Meehl, 1971; Peterson, 1976b, 1983).
The past 20 years have shown that rational arguments count less than some other conditions in determining which degree students receive at graduation. If the degree granted in each of the 44 practitioner programs identified by Caddy and LaPointe (1984) is related to the administrative location of the program, as in Table 1, it appears that use of the PhD for outright professional programs is mainly a practice of freestanding schools. Only three university-based professional programs (at Adelphi, the Fuller Graduate School, and the University of California at Davis) award the PhD degree. In most universities, the PhD is reserved for programs with research and scholarship as dominant objectives. Strictures, or the lack of strictures, imposed by state educational authorities also figure strongly in determining which degree will be allowed. All 14 of the PhD programs in freestanding professional schools are in California! In fact, with the single exception of Adelphi University, all the professional schools that grant the PhD degree for practitioner training are in California. There, regulations in higher education are unusually liberal, and the precedent established by the California School of Professional Psychology has been employed by other institutions to justify use of the PhD for practitioners.
Relation Between Degree Granted and Administrative Location of Program
Is the PsyD a second-class degree? Not yet, according to graduates who reported that the professional doctorate was more often seen as an asset than as a liability in seeking employment in professional psychology (Peterson, Eaton, Levine, & Snepp, 1982). Will the PsyD become a second-class degree? I fear it might, as more and more graduates come from single-purpose professional schools and small departments of uncertain reputation. In the race to poor repute, the PsyD will have stiff competition from the PhD. A professional school of humanistic studies run by 10 full-time and 40 part-time faculty, enrolling 794 students working toward PhDs in counseling, marriage and family therapy, and industrial/organizational psychology (Caddy & LaPointe, 1984) will not improve the value of the PhD. Probably our best hope is that the people who use psychological services will not know the difference, and that the distinction between PhD and PsyD will be just as mysterious and just as inconsequential as the difference between the DDS and the DMD in dentistry.
4. Graduates of scientist-professional programs and graduates of practitioner programs in psychology perform about equally well. The null hypothesis expressed in the sentence above has scarcely been proved. Carefully designed research to test the hypothesis has not been conducted. The few data now available comparing graduates of practitioner programs with graduates of scientist-professional programs either show small differences or no differences at all.
By now it seems fairly clear that students intending to enter careers of practice are more satisfied with practitioner programs than with traditional scientist-practitioner programs (Marwit, 1983; Peterson et al., 1982). Student satisfaction, however, says nothing about professional competence as measured by other means.
So far, internship supervisors have detected few differences between students from scientist-professional programs and those from practitioner programs (Shemberg & Leventhal, 1981; Snepp, 1983). Fully 50% of the supervisors in Shemberg and Leventhal's study, for example, saw no difference in the performance of PsyD and PhD interns; 25% thought the PsyDs were worse; and 25% thought the PhDs were worse. In Snepp's study, a tendency was observed toward greater “sensitivity” among PsyD students and more “scientific” attitudes among PhD students, but differences were small, and preparation in various skills was considered equally good for both groups.
Findings like these may give some comfort to those who feared that professional programs would do worse than scientist-professional programs in educating students. But professional programs are clearly justified only if they do a better job of preparing people for practice than traditional PhD programs have done. The PhD programs, conversely, should be evaluated with regard to the productive scholarship of graduates and the claims of devotees that students are well prepared for practice by the training they receive. Adequate comparative studies have not been done. The obstacles to sound research on these questions are formidable. The criterion problem (i.e., how to evaluate competence in professional psychology) is particularly difficult. I do not agree, however, that these difficulties preclude systematic evaluative research (cf. Stern, 1984). Psychologists are perfectly ready to assess human performance in other complex occupations and to evaluate educational programs in other fields. As the APA Task Force on Education, Training, and Service has recommended (APA, 1982), we need to turn our alleged skills in program evaluation upon ourselves.
5. Curricula of professional schools and scientist-professional programs are more alike than different. The self-study by the NCSPP cited above (Callan, Peterson, & Stricker, in press) concerned more than admissions. Methods for evaluating student competence, curricula, faculty characteristics, administrative organization, and psychological service centers were also described in detail. From analyses of the various curricula, a typical program in professional psychology was derived (Kopplin, in press).
Mean credit requirements are shown in Table 2. APA accreditation criteria strongly influence professional school curricula. All the APA content demands in biological, cognitive-emotional, and social bases of behavior; in professional ethics; and in history and systems of psychology are met in the typical professional school program. Knowledge of personality theory, psychopathology, and human development is ordinarily required. Strong demands are set for professional activities of assessment and intervention (21 credits) and for supervised practicum experience (19 credits). Statistics, measurement, and research design are all required, and all but one of the professional schools requires a dissertation or project devoted to the scholarly study of an issue pertinent to applied psychology. Amounts of credit devoted to dissertation work are included in the general set of “additional required courses,” which also includes courses in consultation, program evaluation, special projects, and advanced courses in any of the areas of the core curriculum.
A Typical Professional School Curriculum
How different is this from the content of most scientist-professional programs? Although comparable analyses of the curricula of departmental PhD programs have not been done, I recently attempted an informal study of the catalogs of 10 highly regarded scientist-professional programs to see what was being taught in those programs today. When I coupled that information with the residual of my experience in reviewing programs for APA accreditation, my conclusion was that practitioner programs and scientist-professional programs (not as idealized but as typically implemented in this country) do not differ much after all.
Scientist-professional programs also are designed to meet APA criteria, and so they contain the necessary substance for approval. Assessment, intervention, and supervised practica are all included, though emphasis on assessment is typically less than in practitioner programs, and I saw no departmental PhD program that included the 1,900 hours of supervised preinternship practicum experience required at Adelphi and Baylor. Like the professional programs, the scientist-practitioner programs routinely require a one-year predoctoral internship. As appropriate for programs designed to educate researchers, the academic PhD programs put a greater emphasis on research design and the conduct of research than any of the practitioner programs. The programs at Vanderbilt and Duke University, for example, not only require the usual courses in statistics and research design but also involve students in research apprenticeships from the beginning of graduate study. To a greater degree than practitioner programs, scientist-professional programs allow electives and encourage specialization. Students at Michigan State University, for example, are required to choose between curricula in child/family and adult clinical psychology, though some crossover is allowed. Students at Yale elect one of three subthemes in clinical psychology, health psychology, community psychology, or more traditional clinical psychodiagnosis and psychotherapy. Specialization in other scientist-professional programs is common, but even in this regard the distinction from practitioner programs is unclear. The Rutgers PsyD program in clinical psychology, for example, requires students to choose between behavioral and psychodynamic tracks, and a third emphasis, on organizational psychology, is under development.
In early formulations (APA, 1967; Peterson, 1966), the differences between research programs and practitioner programs were clear cut. The research programs were designed to educate productive investigators by engaging students in active research throughout graduate study. Professional training was not necessarily reduced in quality but was restricted in scope so that the specialized knowledge required for effective inquiry could be obtained. Training for practice, on the other hand, was to be both thorough and comprehensive, to prepare psychologists for the full range of problems they might face in professional work. Practitioners were educated for the intelligent consumption of research, but the early program proposals contained no dissertation requirements at all.
As the professional programs evolved, however, emphasis on active scholarship increased, and some of the intellectual leaders of the professional school movement (e.g., Meltzoff, 1984) proposed no less an emphasis on scholarly inquiry than is found in most scientist-practitioner programs. The scientist-practitioner programs, for their part, no longer neglect training for practice, as they often did in the past. I have a distinct impression that training for professional service in the best scientist-practitioner programs is better today than it has ever been. In the longer history of applied psychology, the main contribution of the professional schools may be that they forced academic departments and organized psychology to take professional training more seriously than before. In the core of common knowledge, in practicum training for assessment and intervention, and in the requirements for internships and dissertations, the programs in professional schools and in academic departments are more alike than different. If one looks only at curricula, both types of programs seem to be educating scholar-professionals after all.
6. The main differences between practitioner programs and scientist-professional programs lie in the attitudes and interests of faculty and students. The mission statements of scientist-professional programs in academic departments are clear about the emphasis on research in their programs.
The 1984 Duke University clinical program description stated,
We do not conceive of our mission as the training of mental health professionals, but rather the goal is to train scholar-professionals who have the capacity to transform and better our approaches to mental health related phenomena.
According to the mission statement in the 1984 clinical program description of the University of Illinois,
we expect all of our students to develop competence in, and an understanding of, both the scholarly and applied aspects of the field. … Given the above emphasis, the program is not recommended for those who wish to pursue exclusive professional practice careers.
This is different from the acceptance of professional application for its own sake as expressed in the mission statements of professional schools. According to the mission statement in Adelphi University's 1984 catalog, “The professional school … accepts unequivocally the career goal of the students, whether it is clinical practice, research, or teaching.” Wright State University, in Ohio, stated in its 1984 graduate catalog that “it is the mission of the School of Professional Psychology to … educate and train qualified individuals … for quality practice in professional psychology.”
The two kinds of institutions accomplish their objectives in different ways, including the kind of faculty members they recruit. No first-rank scientist-practitioner program in the country will accept as a full-time faculty member anyone without a record of production in research, and the values attached to faculty performance are predominantly those of scholarly contribution. Professional schools engage scholars too, but complement their ranks with people whose lives are devoted primarily to professional service. In the freestanding schools, practitioners form most of the faculty. In university-based schools, practitioners are usually hired on an adjunct basis. Either way, role models for professional careers are provided to students, and the value of practice is affirmed in its own right.
Faculties create the cultures within which graduate education takes place. Although the curricula of academic departments and professional schools do not differ widely, I propose that there are some important differences between the cultures of the two kinds of institutions. Gregory Kimble (1984) has recently done some interesting work on the values and beliefs of psychologists, following the line of thought C. P. Snow (1964) articulated in distinguishing between the scientific and humanist cultures in Western society. With apologies to Charles Osgood, Kimble constructed a device he called the Epistemic Differential. The test consists of statements describing differing views on a range of philosophical issues with which psychologists are perennially concerned, such as the predictability of behavior, relations between nomothetic and idiographic laws, and the relative advantages of data and theory in methodological strategy. Factor analysis defined a coherent scientist/humanist dimension, and the scores of members of several APA divisions were compared. Large differences, significant at the .00001 level, were found. Members of Division 3, Experimental Psychology, expressed views sharply on the side of science. Members of Division 32, Humanistic Psychology, fell to the other side. Members of Division 29, Psychotherapy, were nearly as humanistic as the humanists (Kimble, 1984). So far, no one has compared the faculties of professional schools and academic departments using Kimble's measure, but I will be surprised if substantial differences do not appear when the study is done.
The interests and values of students resemble those of faculty. When Roger Knudson and I examined the interests of students in several clinical psychology programs we found two massive factors, one of interest in research and the other of interest in practice. Students preparing for careers of research and those preparing for careers of practice differed widely in the expected direction (Peterson & Knudson, 1979). Some of the differences are so obvious no studies are needed to demonstrate them. Any site visitor who reviews a program for accreditation will sooner or later get to talking with students about their interests. In the academic departments, students discuss the research they are doing. In the professional schools, students talk about the therapies they are learning.
More than attitudes and interests are required to make a culture. A work culture is formed by a group of people laboring together toward common objectives. A research culture is created by a group of investigators who share the values of science, probe into the questions that intrigue them, dig out the facts, frame ideas and findings into coherent conceptions, talk with each other, and work with each other to find out what is going on in the world—all in an environment that encourages inquiry. The departments of physics at Berkeley or Princeton show us what a research culture can be. In psychology, the Harvard group under Murray in the 1930s, the Yale group under Hull in the 1940s, and the Stanford group (I hesitate to name a single leader) in more recent times show what I mean by a research culture.
The culture of practice is different. There a group of professionals are doing their best to provide services to the public. They are engaged in working out the puzzles of the individual case, talking these over with colleagues, despairing over their failures, enjoying their successes, exulting now and then when particularly stubborn problems yield to the solutions they have engineered, designing new programs together, working these into the community, and helping people right now with the best professional service they can offer. The Mayo Medical Center shows what the culture of practice can be. In psychology, Albert Ellis's Institute of Rational-Emotive Therapy and the Psychological Center at the Fuller Graduate School are starting to show what can be done to take psychological services to the people.
Many academic departments bring students into the culture of research. Few of them provide comparable socialization in practice, though many provide satisfactory training for professional work. Professional schools bring students into the culture of practice. Few provide comparable socialization in research, though professional schools that maintain active research programs can provide cultures of research as well.
7. Under some conditions, the cultures of science and practice can be blended. The kinds of science and practice prevalent in 1964, when Pinard delivered his diatribe against the scientist-professional model of education, defied integration. At that time, any “scientific” project that was not empirical in substance and experimental in method stood little chance for approval or publication. “Practice” consisted mainly of individual psychotherapy, indeterminately related to individual assessment procedures of questionable value. Most of the research of the time was irrelevant to practice, the practice of the time was invulnerable to research, and each activity went on in isolation from the other. Over the past 20 years, the definition of acceptable scholarly work has been extended. During the same time, the profession has changed in ways that allow scholarly investigation to improve it. These are the conditions required for the blending of science and practice.
The past 20 years have seen a considerable liberalization of methodological constraint in psychological inquiry. Kimble (1984) wrote about an “easy acceptance” of topics for research that would have been out of bounds in earlier times (p. 838). “Mental imagery, the distinction between remembered and imagined, voluntary behavior, self-awareness and self-control, conceptually driven processing, helplessness and coping, risk taking, metaphoric expression, and inferential processing are a few of these topics, all of which are identified by phrases that catch important ideas in the humanist tradition” (Kimble, 1984, p. 838). In the behavioral tradition of professional psychology, the development of single-subject designs and the successful implementation of field studies have allowed systematic inquiry in areas of clear practical importance. Among titles of doctoral proposals listed by Leitenberg (1974) in describing the scientist-professional program at the University of Vermont are “The Prediction of Medical Rehabilitation Outcome,” “A Contingency Management and Fading Procedure for the Modification of the Classroom Behavior of Institutionalized Delinquents,” “The Generality Issue in a Head-Start Behavior Modification Program,” and “Changes in Interaction Patterns in Multiple Family Therapy.” Barlow, Hayes, and Nelson (1984) recently completed an analysis of the issues that divide scientists from practitioners in psychology and proposed an integrated model of applied research that includes clinical observation, generation of new intervention procedures, generation of new measurement procedures, single case studies, clinical analogue studies, short-and long-term outcome studies, evaluation of training and dissemination methods, and evaluation of field efficacy. In the view of Barlow, Hayes, and Nelson, responsible practitioners must employ combinations of these procedures to be accountable, and by the systematic accumulation of knowledge through replicated case studies and other means practitioners may contribute to science as well.
Outside the boundaries of science as conventionally conceived lie the disciplines of humanistic inquiry. The interpretive studies of historians, for example, are not usually regarded as science, but they are not intuitive art either. A disciplined historian has strong concern for such issues as the validity of report and the coherent interpretation of scattered fragments of fact. In literature, the writing of biography requires careful attention to accuracy of account, reconciliation of disparate reports, and elaboration of coherent themes that unify the life of the subject. Some of the humanities require discipline as firm as any science. Thoughtfully conceived and carefully executed, inquiries of these kinds can produce an order as compelling as many an experimental series and often more useful for understanding some of the processes a clinician needs to comprehend. The proper base for practice in psychology is not science but disciplined knowledge. The scholarly activity required to build that knowledge may take many forms. Instead of restricting inquiries to suit our methods, we must design methods to suit the problems we face as practitioners.
As science changes, so will practice. Three surveys (Callan, Peterson, & Stricker, in press; Garfield & Kurtz, 1976; Peterson et al., 1982) show that professional psychologists spend more time doing individual psychotherapy than any other single activity. I regard the practice of psychotherapy as a perfectly honorable and fairly useful way to make a living, but there is no reason to suppose psychologists do better at it than people from several other professions, including some whose services come cheaper than ours. If professional psychology is to serve the public effectively and efficiently, it will help to broaden our scope from individuals to groups and organizations, to shift our orientation to include prevention as well as treatment, and to extend the settings in which we work from mental health centers to the full range of environments in which human dysfunctions may occur and in which psychological knowledge may be applied to improve human function. Assessment remains a critical skill for professional psychologists, but it cannot be restricted to the assessment of individual personality. We also need to study groups and organizations in natural settings to find out how they work, what can go wrong with them, what can be done to improve them, and how to evaluate any improvements we have attempted. A professional psychology conceived in this way—broad enough to accommodate the problems we address, based on disciplined knowledge, and linking conception, assessment, and intervention as systematically as the human condition allows—can be accountable and self-corrective and thereby more useful to society than much professional activity is today.
The argument for extending the scope of professional psychology has been stated most recently by Sarason (1981) and Levy (1984). Many of the ideas Sarason and Levy expressed so well are embodied in the charters of several schools of professional psychology. How much we actually know about the grand range of problems we have staked out is another matter, but a reasonably firm knowledge base for professional psychology has been established (Peterson, 1976a), and a professional psychology linked with the broad-ranging disciplines of inquiry proposed above offers every promise of improving in the future.
Education for practice is not less difficult than education for research. In some regards, it is more difficult. Knowledge of fact and theory must be just as thorough, and the range of knowledge required for practice is greater. Practitioners must not only understand the facts and concepts of psychology, but they must also know how to apply them in helping others. Frank Hawkinshire, of New York University, has drawn my attention to some ideas of his mentor, W. H. Cowley, about the aims of professional education. Cowley (1960) distinguished among three kinds of education, which he called logocentric, practicentric, and democentric. Logocentric literally means “centered in knowledge.” A logocentrist is concerned with advancing the boundaries of knowledge without concern for practical affairs. Practicentric education is concerned with the skills of practice in applying knowledge to solve problems. Democentric education, in Cowley's definition, is concerned with interpreting knowledge for the public at large, but the meaning of the term would not be violated if the demos were taken to be students who enter our schools, and the democentric emphasis in education a concern for the personal development of the people we hope to influence.
Education of scientists is dominantly logocentric and probably must remain so if the science is to advance. Education of professionals is dominantly practicentric and probably must be so if the skills of the profession are to be fully taught. I do not know what we can do to advance the personal development of students. Most of them are well formed when they come to us. We can, however, stop quenching their concern for others in a cold objectivity that does not suit our discipline in the first place. We can stop requiring hypocrisy of them, as we do by refusing entry to the profession unless they pretend interests they do not have. If we can create environments in which proper regard is given to disciplined knowledge, the skills of practice are taught and respected, and the integrity of students is not impaired, it may not matter whether we work in professional schools, large departments, or small departments. We will all be giving students all we can.
