Overlap among clinical, counseling, and school psychology: Implications for the profession and Combined‐Integrated training

Abstract

Health care providers within psychology currently fall into three dominant practice areas: clinical, counseling, and school psychology. This article reviews data from four different sources-archival descriptions, training curricula, internship and employment outcomes, and professional activities-to examine the overlap among the three practice areas. Archival descriptions revealed substantial similarities, with smaller but interesting differences. A comparison of actual curricula from 10 programs accredited in each of the three practice areas yielded similar findings: Programs across the three practice areas were much more similar than different. Within-practice area variations among programs were nearly as large as across-practice area differences. We briefly review the professional activities of clinical, counseling, and school psychologists, again demonstrating considerable similarity. We conclude by explaining implications for doctoral training programs, internships settings, and professional credentialing.

A history of Combined‐Integrated doctoral training in psychology

“…Preliminary empirical evidence to support the C-I model is provided here and in other articles in this special series (e.g., Braxton et al, 2004;Cobb et al, 2004). The available data indicate that students from C-I programs receive APA-accredited internships at rates that are equal to, if not greater than, those in single-practice-area programs.…”

“…As programs become more "integrated" in the future, their students may eschew theoretical hegemony in favor of a more integrative approach to theory and a much wider horizon of opportunities for practice, which are no longer circumscribed by artificial boundaries among the practice areas (Braxton et al, 2004;Brown et al, in press;Cobb et al, 2004;Shealy, in press). Such integrated programs will probably permit the development of "concentrations" or "emphases" such as neuropsychology, early childhood, family, or forensics, but these may occur subsequent to the acquisition of a core set of functional and foundational competencies.…”

“…Further, the future is likely to be punctuated by even more diversity. Indeed, the Consensus Conference participants took note of the great difficulty one would have, even in the near future, in finding significant differences among the curricula of the three training practice areas (see Braxton et al, 2004;Cobb et al, 2004;.…”

“…However, the degree to which differentiation truly exists among separate practice areas within psychology is unclear and has largely been based on self-definition rather than on evidence of distinctiveness (see Cobb et al, 2004). It is not surprising, therefore, that there are wide differences of opinions among scholars, training programs, and the profession about what constitutes a psychological practice area.…”

“…Indeed, there is no consensual definition of what constitutes psychology itself (see Henriques & Sternberg, in press;Plaud & Illardi, 2000), and much less agreement on what constitutes the identifiable and unique skills and experiences that characterize those trained in separate practice areas, especially among the currently recognized areas of clinical, counseling, and school psychology. Wide overlap of assumed specialized skills exists among the three major psychology practice areas (see Cobb et al, 2004). There are few activities that any of these self-defined groups will voluntarily indicate are outside of their purview and preparation.…”