Counseling Psychology Research
Research training is an ongoing integral part of the counseling psychology graduate program.
The program's and department's research focuses on issues of diversity across all of our specialty areas. All students will receive excellent training in scientific and scholarly skills.
Objectives
- To provide training and experience for students as scientists
- To provide continuous opportunities and encouragement throughout the program for students to develop research and scientific competencies, to observe successful scientific actions in faculty and students, and to publish
- To help students develop the broad-based skills needed to meet the challenges and demands of the profession as well as to acquire some foundation knowledge and skills in a subspecialty area
- To help students develop awareness of and sensitivity for multicultural issues in research and science, and to develop the skills needed to conduct culturally competent research
Training
In the first year of graduate study, students take four core psychology courses, which expose them to theory, content and methodology of psychology as a science. Students also enroll in a research methods course during their first year and are introduced to the basics and process of conducting and disseminating research in counseling psychology with the goal of initiating a thesis proposal.
Two research projects are required prior to graduation: One leading to the master’s thesis and another leading to the doctoral dissertation. Students are required to work with a member of the psychology faculty who will act as their supervisor for master’s or doctoral research. In addition, students are encouraged to conduct research in collaboration with other faculty members, who themselves are conducting research aimed at scholarly publication.
Students are expected to participate with their advisers on research teams on an ongoing basis from the moment they arrive. We aim to help every student publish, at a minimum, one article or chapter by the time they graduate, as well as present research at national conferences.
Grants
Counseling program faculty members believe that seeking, administering and completing grants involve critical skills for the 21st-century psychologist. Whether a student aspires to a research or practice setting post-Ph.D., the likelihood will be high that the student must be appropriately entrepreneurial.
At the present time, several core counseling faculty members have active grants for research, service-delivery or training. The variety of grant-funded projects provides students with many faculty models for dealing with grants — including seeking grant support, administering the grants and building on established grants. The Department of Psychology offers a course in grant writing in which graduate students often enroll. Stemming from this course, many of our students have submitted grant applications.