Description
Ultimately, the goal of students in health-directed psychology is to obtain licensure as a psychologist. In order to acquire licensure, education, training, and examinations are required. When applying to doctoral programs, particular attributes of those programs, such as data on education and training outcomes (IR-C20), are recommended to review. The implementing regulation section C20 ("IR-C20") is mandated by the American Psychological Association (APA) for public disclosure of training and education outcomes. This publicly reported data for each program includes the average time to completion, the program costs including assistantships and fellowships, the number and percentage of students who apply for and obtain internships (as well as characteristics of the internships students obtained), the attrition rate for eight years, and the number and percentage of graduates who have become licensed psychologists. Likewise, certain qualities of graduate programs, including area, type of degree, and overall competiveness, make doctoral candidates from those programs more competitive when applying for internships. An additional important factor to consider when assessing quality of training and education is the nature of the internship; in particular, the proportion of students who are placed in accredited positions. At this time, it is not known whether certain program characteristics are related to successful internship placement, and whether this in turn produces higher pass rates on the Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP). The aim of this study is to measure these factors by simultaneously considering the effect of program characteristics, internship site placement, and pass rates of EPPP. Specifically, it was predicted that program characteristics, such as area (clinical, counseling, and school), degree type in clinical psychology (Ph.D. and Psy.D.), and membership to training councils, and IR-C20 data, will predict internship characteristics, such as accreditation status, which then will predict EPPP outcomes. An exhaustive search of all programs clinical, counseling, school and combined for full disclosure of IR-C20 data on their respective web sites was conducted and a sample of 360 programs was found. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was performed to investigate EPPP scores amount of variance accounted by APA internship placement, after controlling for program characteristics such as admittance rate, licensure rate, time to completion, attrition, and Training characteristics such as area of psychology (Clinical, Counseling, or School), Degree (Ph.D. or Psy.D.), and membership to training councils. APA internship placement explained 36.9% of the variance in EPPP scores after controlling for all other independent variables (_R2= .369; F(8, 233) = 18.623; p <.001). Findings from this study indicate the potential value of investigating APA accredited internships in regards to the match rate imbalance. Future research should examine similar characteristics successful in licensure for the value of standardizing requirements across programs. The results of this study will contribute to the growing body of knowledge on successful program attributes and their relationship to licensure.
