Education and Training in Clinical Psychology

There are basic aspects of becoming a clinical psychologist that are common across graduate programs. Students who want to pursue clinical psychology as a profession must earn a doctorate in clinical psychology. Most clinical psychology programs are designed so that students enter with a bachelor's degree and earn their master's degree during the course of their doctoral studies. Some students might earn a master's before entering a doctoral program or after working for a few years, but many programs are designed so that students enter with a bachelor's degree and leave with both a master's and a doctorate.

Many clinical programs include training that consists of three to four years of intensive study and a one-year, full-time pre-doctoral internship. Students typically complete a master's thesis and then must pass comprehensive examinations before moving into their doctoral studies. Students must also complete a dissertation and practicum placements, where they begin to get clinical experience and work with patients while under the supervision of licensed psychologists.

While these primary elements are common to most programs, many programs include specialty tracks, such as child clinical psychology, health psychology, or neuropsychology.

Your textbook describes the three training models that graduate programs use (Pomerantz, 2024):

• The scientist-practitioner (Boulder) model dominated graduate training for many years. It is a two-pronged approach that assumes that clinical psychology training should emphasize both clinical and research skills. Graduates of related programs are well-trained clinicians who have completed rigorous research programs culminating in the completion of a doctoral dissertation.
• The practitioner-scholar (Vail) model emerged because many felt that there should be options for those who primarily wanted to be clinicians, who were not interested in academia. Furthermore, some in the profession worried that there weren't enough well-trained clinicians to serve the needs of the population. This led to the evolution of the PsyD program (practitioner-scholar), which is primarily geared toward clinical training and less focused on research.
• The clinical scientist model grew out of a movement in the 1990s that placed primary importance on empirical research. A PhD from a clinical scientist program emphasizes evidence-based clinical methods.