Imaginando el futuro en la práctica de la psicología profesional: un estudio de las representaciones de estudiantes universitarios

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of 213 university students of Clinical Psychology that explores affective symbolizations, which structure their relationship with hosting bodies in internship experience. This is in order to detect students’ main representations about their role as interns, professional activities and functions they have to comply with and the perceived integration between university education and real work contexts. A questionnaire was administered for the analysis of students’ motivational dynamics and expectations activated by imagining their future internship. Four clusters of students have been identified, through multivariate statistical techniques, multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and cluster analysis (CA). Results were as follows: a general powerlessness, distrust and disinvestment toward internship (17.7%); affiliation with hosting bodies in order to gain increasing acceptance and power (33.8%); high pragmatism, task-orientation and compliance with what the hosting bodies propose (30.8%) and a demand for recognition without any negotiation (17.7%). No relationship is detected between clusters and some illustrative variables related to sex and indicators of academic success, problems and participation. These clusters are conceived along three latent dimensions, which explain 57.9% of the total variance and refer to: disengagement/involvement toward internship experience; owerlessness/omnipotence about using competences and devaluation/idealization of the hosting body in relation to university training. Overall, two critical issues emerge: the first refers to a gap between university training and internship, the second one deals with discontinuity between the internship and the labor market. Some reflections and implications for practice are discussed.

Career adaptability as a strategic competence for career development

“…EJTD 41,1 Furthermore, because of the wide variety of employees and the lack of information about their different work environments, further research is required to disentangle the context-related effects, which may have a role in career adaptability. For instance, affective symbolizations -intended as unconscious affective processes and emotional expectationsare demonstrated to impact the relationship with work contexts (Langher et al, 2014).…”

Clinical Psychological Figures in Healthcare Professionals: Resilience and Maladjustment as the “Cost of Care”

“…Many of the caregivers have not received specialized education, to the point that they do not have skills useful for dealing with the pathological realities of patients. This figure is also extended to those professional figures who by definition acquire skills during the university training courses (Langher et al, 2014(Langher et al, , 2018Donsì, 2018, Settineri et al, 2018;Parola and Donsì, 2019;Merlo et al, 2020b;Parola and Felaco, 2020). The success or failure of therapies and treatments often depends on the skills of health professionals, and this suggests that they cannot be overlooked, with particular reference to adult and adolescent medical conditions (Mullen, 1997;Brown, 1999;Lingiardi et al, 2010;Shrivastava et al, 2013;Sugiharto et al, 2017;Di Giuseppe et al, 2019a;Martino et al, 2019a;Rosa et al, 2019Ardeleanu et al, 2020;Martino et al, 2020;Moroianu et al, 2020;Muzi, 2020;Nedelcu et al, 2020).…”

“I Have Been Bullied at Workplace!”: A Qualitative Study on Italian Employees’ Stories

“…Clusters are labelled by the researcher based on the typical vocabulary and sentences of which they are composed of. Indeed, the interpretation relies on a more qualitative approach based on reading the texts to achieve an in-depth familiarity with the workplace bullying stories and on using models of affective symbolization (Carli & Paniccia, 2002;Langher, Brancadoro, D'Angeli, & Caputo, 2014) -such as the emotional dichotomies of inclusion/exclusion, power/dependence, trust/mistrustto give sense to words/sentences of each thematic domain.…”