Raising the interest of clinical doctoral students in basic research: three challenges.

Williams, John K. ; Hill, Peter C. ; Kim, Sohye 等

One of us (Hill) has a son who played basketball throughout junior and senior high school. His seventh grade team was atrocious, losing their first game 62-8. They won only two games all year. It was, however, a very successful year. The coach was not interested in winning; he was interested in developing good basketball players. Under the watchful eye of the local high school coach, the practices in the 7th grade repeatedly emphasized such basic skills as dribbling, bounce-passing, quick footwork, jumping, shooting skills, aggressive defense and, most importantly, the discipline necessary to keep working at those skills, even when the players just wanted to play basketball. Thus, the program was not designed to win ball games in the 7th grade, but to win games in the 11th and 12th grades. During their senior year, that same group of guys, none of whom were particularly gifted athletes, won 20 of 24 regular season games and went far in the state playoff competition. All of the hard work developing those basic skills paid off--a point not forgotten by the son who is now a young adult.

In principle, clinical training and practice are based on the science of psychology, and this is the basis for national doctoral-level standards for clinical psychology established by the American Psychological Association (APA, 2007). Guiding this principle is the perspective that the science and practice of psychology are in a symbiotic relationship and, therefore, the development of basic research skills--much like foundational skills in basketball--are critical to clinical training. Every program, regardless of the model (scientist-practitioner or practitioner-scholar) or the degree (PhD, EdD, or PsyD), is required to integrate science and practice. Ideally, science informs practice (often in the form of evidence-based practices), and practice informs science (often by forming research questions related to clinical work).

In reality, however, the science and practice of psychology often reflect a cultural divide so that training in one of these domains may be at the expense of the other. Consequently, a zero-sum game is often developed in which resources are devoted to one or the other rather than to both areas. Thus, in programs where the primary mission is to prepare graduates for professional practice, the scientific methodology required to conduct research may be downplayed. While this may not be the intention of the faculty, the demands for clinical courses and supervision may overwhelm the value of scholarly productivity and result in less attention on research endeavors. Consequently, time and resources are devoted to clinical training rather than research projects.

The challenges for faculty and administrators are similar to those of the 7th grade basketball coach. The groans from graduate students, though mature adults, regarding research requirements sound eerily similar to those of the young basketball players after their 7th grade practices. For the most part, students do not come to clinically-oriented doctoral programs to develop research skills; they just want learn the professional knowledge-base and develop the skills necessary to help people. Most recognize the need for basic clinical skill training and are willing to accept and even appreciate such training in the first couple of years as necessary; however, many of those same students endure rather than embrace basic research training.

Most organizations, including clinical psychology doctoral programs, develop a culture that becomes increasingly entrenched over time. Unless research and scholarship are accorded an essential role during critical developmental periods, these programs may compromise the dynamic balance between science and practice and gravitate toward one side of the equation. As a result, mature programs run the risk of becoming too research-driven or too clinically-driven, and doctoral students do not receive the balanced approach that the profession idealizes.

Thus, the challenge to faculty in clinical psychology programs that define their primary purpose as providing strong clinical training to produce practitioners is essentially a cultural one; namely, how do we re-focus the program to create a culture in which there is a dynamic balance between science (research) and practice? Three suggestions, provided here in the form of challenges, are written from faculty (two of us are faculty with active research programs), administrative (one of us is the Academic Dean and one of the two faculty members is also the Director of Research in our program), and student (one of us is a recent graduate of our Ph.D. program) perspectives.

Challenge 1: Place a High Priority on Research Mentoring and Scholarship in Hiring New Clinical Faculty

This is a challenge that might be met with resistance among some faculty colleagues; however, changing an academic culture begins with the faculty. Obviously, it is important that clinical faculty be excellent clinicians and teachers. But it is also important that they be excellent scholars and researchers and that their research productivity be given importance in their job description and in the criteria for promotion and tenure. What is not suggested here is that research necessarily be given priority over clinical and teaching capabilities (though perhaps this might be considered for a few positions in a large program), such as is often found in Tier 1 research programs. However, it is important that programs adopt a third-person perspective to assess the bigger picture of a complete clinical education and ask where the holes in the program are. If the identified holes involve research and scholarship, then priority should be given to those domains in hiring new faculty.

Colleagues who are clinicians may be inclined to give much higher priority to assessing the candidate's skills and orientation as a clinician in the hiring process. It is not unusual for the candidate to present his or her research as one criterion in the hiring decision, and sometimes this presentation is in a classroom setting so that teaching skills can be assessed as well. However, the process may stop there, and the more important questions about the priority of research in the candidate's own scholarly agenda, the ability to establish and maintain an ongoing research program, the potential for publication of that research program, the willingness to go after external funding, the ability to engage students in research--all standard questions in more research oriented programs--may not probed with the same level of detail as the general clinical orientations and skills of the candidate.

If the challenge of hiring clinical faculty with a greater emphasis on research is not addressed, stressors will develop for both students and faculty as graduate students attempt to fulfill their scholarship requirement through the dissertation project. Students may report difficulties finding professors willing to either supervise their research projects or serve on their dissertation committees. At the very least, this will lead to frustration for students and, potentially, could also delay graduation.

For the faculty members who are willing to get involved with student research projects, it can also become quite frustrating when other faculty members are not willing or able to serve on research committees. Because the availability of faculty members to serve on dissertation committees may be limited to those who are more research oriented, some of these faculty members may end up overcommitted to a large number of projects, which will compete with their time to fulfill other faculty responsibilities and may reduce the time available to spend with individual students.

Challenge 2: Conduct the Kind of Research that Will Convincingly Demonstrate to Students that Being Trained in Research Is Indeed Relevant to Becoming a Good Clinician

Here, the burden rests primarily on the researcher to make a strong case for the importance of research to the daily work of clinicians. Faculty in a clinical program, whether they be clinical psychologists or not, should have at least some research programs that are clinically relevant. Too often researchers have identified some small research niche that they, and they only, find of interest and perhaps relevance. Clinical students appropriately resist working on such research because it appears to be irrelevant to their educational and career goals. So, it is important that faculty members develop other lines of research that will be of interest and relevance to clinical students.

One of the authors (Williams) seems to have successfully addressed this issue with his research programs. He was hired at our university about ten years ago. While his main responsibility was to teach in the undergraduate program, it was also understood that he would supervise doctoral students on their dissertation research. Trained as a cognitive psychologist, most of his own research had focused on visual attention using reaction time measures. Now he was being asked to chair and serve on dissertation committees of graduate students in a clinical psychology program. There was clearly little overlap between his own research and the interests of the students, and during his first two to three years he was rarely asked to serve on committees, much less chair them. It was difficult for him to understand all the measures and language particular to the field of clinical psychology; however, his background as an experimental psychologist allowed him to at least give input on the research design, data analyses, and interpretation of the results.

A year or two later, the author decided to change drastically the focus of his own research. He had the opportunity at that point to purchase the equipment needed to conduct research measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs) using standard EEG equipment. Because he did not have any formal training with that paradigm, with the help and encouragement of his dean, he spent the next two years (which included a sabbatical) attending conferences and training sessions to better understand how to gather, analyze, and interpret ERP data. After many unfruitful experiments, he finally was able to obtain data that seemed publishable, and recently published his first article using ERP measures (see Williams & Themanson, 2011).

While learning how to conduct ERP research, word started to spread and he began to have graduate students come talk to him about their interest in neurophysiological measures, and in possibly having him help them design studies in which ERPs would be the primary dependent variable. At first he was hesitant; not only did he not have much experience using these measures, but the topics the students were interested in were still far away from his area of expertise. However, he decided he would help them design studies using ERP measures if they would teach him about their topic of interest so that he could have a sufficient understanding in order to guide them on making hypotheses and interpreting their results. This is the approach he has used with the graduate students for the past three years, and it has served to create a type of symbiosis. Students are benefitting by being able to use measures that are not readily available in doctoral programs that are heavily focused on clinical training and they have a greater opportunity to conduct strong, basic research that is potentially publishable in higher-tiered journals. On the other hand, the author is gaining a greater understanding of topics that are in the mainstream of clinical psychology research and has become more interested in studying such topics. Furthermore, he has been slowly changing his own research program to include some of the clinical measures of interest to graduate students.

Challenge 3: Motivating Some Students to Put Forth the Effort Necessary to Develop Good Research Skills, While Cultivating the Research Interests of Those who Are Already Motivated

Low research motivation is a problem encountered in many programs designed to train practitioners. However, low motivation may be a disguise for lack of confidence. Social psychological research on self-handicapping (Deppe & Harackiewicz, 1996) suggests that attributing the possibility of poor performance to low effort is less threatening than attributing it to low ability. Our experience is that many, perhaps a majority, of those students who are reluctant researchers are not confident in their own research skills. Confidence in one's own research skills will breed a more positive attitude and higher motivation level.

It is also important that faculty help graduate students understand the clinical benefit of the research process. Much attention is paid to the outcome of research projects, and clinical students may have a tendency to diminish the relevance of seemingly unimportant or irrelevant outcomes. On the other hand, there is significant benefit to clinical students in learning from the research process. Careful reading of the research, articulating precise hypotheses, controlling variables, interpreting results, and making appropriate applications all have implications for the clinical arena. In clinical programs, faculty are in the business of helping develop clinicians who can make careful observations and interpretations to clients, and the research process can assist in developing these skills. Faculty members should be encouraged to help graduate students make this important connection to their clinical work.

An example of an attempt to improve the attitude and confidence of students toward research, as well as to demonstrate the clinical benefits of the research process, is being done by one of the authors (Hill) in his role as the Director of Research in our graduate program. Included in his responsibilities is mentoring students in evaluating and conducting research, even as they are working with their dissertation chair and committee with regard to specific content. Though they meet as a group for a semester and for which he receives teaching credit, this is not a traditional research course. His primary role is to serve as a research consultant in which he comes alongside the student and gives research pointers ranging anywhere from how to construct a conceptual line of reasoning through the literature review to designing a study. Perhaps one of the most rewarding aspects of this responsibility is to observe the increase in confidence in those students to whom research was once an unwanted chore; as they feel more confident, it is not uncommon for them to feel more positive toward the research experience.

While these steps may serve to improve the motivation of students that show little interest in research, some graduate students enter our program with a desire for both good clinical training and strong research training. A good example of how the intrinsic motivation for understanding and conducting strong research was cultivated in one of our graduate students is the story of one of the authors of this paper (Kim), a recent graduate of our program.

Her desire for in-depth clinical training, grounded in the solid integration of psychology and theology, brought her to our program. However, she found that her clinical training and work, while rewarding in and of itself, continually inspired and deepened her passion for research. A major challenge for the students, as she saw and experienced it, lay in navigating heavy loads of therapy and assessment labs and practica suited to train them in long-term in-depth clinical modalities, while concurrently immersed in theology/integration courses along with the standard clinical psychology curriculum put forth by the American Psychological Association (APA). Finding the time and resources for fulfilling research requirements amidst the intensity of this training was a well-known difficulty for Ph.D. students.

Looking back, she let her passion for research recede to the background during those early stages of training; yet this absorption in clinical and integrative frameworks ultimately strengthened and confirmed her commitment to research. As her early musings grew, expanded, and ripened alongside her clinical encounters, so did the curiosity and eagerness to capture in science what made conceptual, clinical, and theological sense.

She became increasingly fascinated with the ways in which the explicit and the implicit, and the measurable and the immeasurable, intersect in the human mind, brain, and relationships. She naturally gravitated toward methods of science that have the capacity to tap into what has traditionally been considered intangible or unquantifiable. While a few other graduate students were having some difficulty forming dissertation committees, she was able to find a group of faculty members whose conjoint expertise aligned with these pursuits and whose mentorship and guidance were instrumental. Their strengths were complementary: one with a background in cognitive science, one with an understanding of intrapsychic and interpersonal dynamics, and the third with the ability to integrate developmental and relational insights within the realm of spirituality.

She was still weaving through these paradigms theoretically and experientially when she undertook her own research for her master's and doctoral projects. In both of these endeavors, she attempted to capture the contours of the cohesive understanding that was emerging within her and the questions then held close to her heart. In the master's thesis, she drew upon the concept of implicit relational knowledge as a cognitive basis for understanding the stability of pre-verbal mental representations. With the guidance of Williams, she was able to create an implicit measure of attachment and religiosity (i.e., The Implicit Association Test) alongside its explicit counterparts, and ventured into empirically assessing subconscious automatic processes by examining the correspondence between implicit internal working models of parents and God.

Her dissertation delved further into attachment-related preconscious processes at the level of neurophysiological substrates. She utilized ERP measures to map patterns of unique brain processes involved in the activation, deactivation, and hyperactivation of the attachment system. Sequentially tracing the flow of cognitive and emotional processes, at both early bottom-up (preconscious) and late top-down (conscious) stages, during the manifestation of hyperactivating and deactivating affect regulation strategies was of particular interest. Both studies sought to elucidate the neurocognitive and neurobiological mechanisms through which enduring character structures are built in early childhood. The insights gained from these empirical endeavors have enriched her clinical experience as she now works with clients to reconstruct these dynamics as they occur in therapy, thereby effecting lasting growth.

Conclusion

Doctoral students in clinical training programs may face several barriers that reduce their interest in basic research and hinder their ability to conduct strong research as part of their training. We believe that these barriers can be minimized if faculty and administrators of such programs address the following three challenges: (a) place a high priority on research mentoring when hiring new faculty, (b) conduct research that is relevant to clinical students, and (c) motivate students to develop good research skills. While these challenges may be difficult to successfully meet, they can undoubtedly improve the training of the doctoral students if tackled.

References

American Psychological Association. (2007). Guidelines and principles for accreditation of programs in professional psychology. Washington, DC: Author.

Deppe, R. K., & Harackiewicz, J. M. (1996). Self-handicapping and intrinsic motivation: Buffering intrinsic motivation from the threat of failure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 868-876. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.70.4.868

Williams, J. K., & Themanson, J. R. (2011). Neural correlates of the Implicit Association Test: Evidence for semantic and emotional processing. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 6, 468-476. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsq065

John K. Williams

Biola University

Peter C. Hill

Biola University

Sohye Kim

Baylor College of Medicine

Clark D. Campbell

Biola University

Correspondence regarding this article should be sent to John K. Williams, Ph.D., Rosemead School of Psychology, Biola University, 13800 Biola Ave., La Mirada, CA 90639; john.williams@biola.edu

John K. Williams (Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology, University of California, Irvine, 1998) is Associate Professor of Psychology at the Rosemead School of Psychology, Biola University (CA). Dr. Williams' research interests focus on implicit and neuropsychological (ERP) measures with respect to social cognitive and religious issues.

Peter C. Hill (Ph.D. in Social Psychology, University of Houston) is Professor of Psychology at the Rosemead School of Psychology, Biola University (CA) and editor of the Journal of Psychology and Christianity. Dr. Hill's interests include measurement issues, the integration of psychology and religion, the psychology of religion, and positive psychology.

Sohye Kim (Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, Rosemead School of Psychology) is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Pediatrics and the Menninger Department of Psychiatry, Baylor College of Medicine (TX). Her research interests lie in neurobiology of attachment and developmental psychopathology. Her clinical work focuses on the treatment of severe and chronic mental illness from an object-relations/attachment-based framework.

Clark D. Campbell (Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, Graduate School of Clinical Psychology, Western Seminary) is Dean of Rosemead School of Psychology, Biola University (CA). Dr. Campbell's research interests include professional issues in psychology education, rural psychology, integration of psychology and theology, and primary care psychology.