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Requirements
PROGRAM DESIGN & CURRICULUM OVERVIEW
Program Courses
The program, which adheres strongly to a scientist-practitioner model, prepares students to engage in both scientific research and clinical practice, through a consistent, dual emphasis on research and clinical training. The program requires a minimum of five years of full-time study, consisting of required and elective academic course work, a minimum of two year- long, part-time practica in the second and third years of graduate training, an empirical master’s thesis, a qualifying examination, an empirical doctoral dissertation, teaching experience, and completion of a one-year, full-time, APA-accredited internship.
Required Core and Practicum Courses are as follows:
Required Core Courses
PSYCLN 601 Testing and Assessment I
PSYCLN 610 Culture and Mental Health
PSYCLN 613 Lifespan Psychopathology
PSYCLN 620 Intervention Strategies
PSYCLN 641 Cognitive and Affective Bases of Behavior
PSYCLN 642 Social and Cultural Bases of Behavior
PSYCLN 660 Biological Bases of Behavior
PSYCLN 670 Advanced Statistics
PSYCLN 675 Research Methods and Ethics in Clinical Psychology
PSYCLN 680 History and Systems of Psychology
PSYCLN 699 Master’s Research Seminar
Required Practicum Courses and Training (Practicum Seminars I, II, III, and IV are led by core clinical faculty members and accompany the second and third year practica.)
PSYCLN 785 Practicum I and Ethics
PSYCLN 786 Practicum II and Ethics
PSYCLN 787 Practicum III
PSYCLN 788 Practicum IV
Elective Practicum Courses and Training
PSYCLN 690 Introduction to Clinical Outreach and Intervention Practicum
PSYCLN 691/692 Clinical Research Practicum I & II
PSYCLN 781 Assessment Practicum I
PSYCLN 782 Assessment Practicum II
PSYCLN 783 Advanced Clinical Research Practicum I
PSYCLN 784 Advanced Clinical Research Practicum II
PSYCLN 791 Advanced Clinical Outreach, Intervention, & Consultation Practicum I
PSYCLN 792 Advanced Clinical Outreach, Intervention, & Consultation Practicum II
PSYCLN 893 Advanced Community Practicum I
PSYCLN 894 Advanced Community Practicum II
These on campus and advanced off-campus practica are described in the Practicum Handbook.
Required APA Accredited Internship (See Internship Handbook)
PSYCLN 898 Internship
Master’s Thesis and Dissertation Research Credits
Students must also enroll for master’s thesis and dissertation research credits.
PSYCLN 698 Masters Research Credit
PSYCLN 899 Dissertation Research
Fourth Year Teaching Requirement
Unless a student petitions to waive the teaching requirement, all students must take a required teaching seminar in their fourth year, when they are concurrently teaching their own courses.
PSYCLN 891 Teaching Seminar
Required Elective Distribution Courses:
In addition to these core courses, research credits, teaching seminar, and practicum experiences, students must complete four total elective courses, one in each of the following four categories: (1) Advanced Methods and Analysis; (2) Assessment; (3) Diversity; and (4) Therapy Approaches. The electives offered are listed below.
Most electives are offered every two or three years and, thus, we encourage students to plan accordingly and contact the course instructor or DCT for information about the next planned offering for a given elective.
Group 1: Therapy Approaches
PSYCLN 720 Family Systems & Family Therapy
PSYCLN 721 Child Psychotherapy
PSYCLN 726 Cognitive Behavioral Theory and Therapy
PSYCLN 727 Emotion Focused Therapy
Group 2: Assessment
PSYCLN 602 Testing and Assessment II (Personality Assessment)
PSYCLN 701 Neuropsychological Assessment
PSYCLN 710 Child Assessment
Group 3—Advanced Methods and Analysis
PSYCLN 770 Multivariate Statistics and Causal Modeling
PSYCLN 775 Qualitative Methods in Clinical Psychology
Group 4—Diversity
PSYCLN 742 Social Construction of Self & Identity
PSYCLN 879 Advanced Community Psychology
Students may also enroll in additional non-required courses offered through other UMass Boston departments (e.g., language courses, psychotherapy courses, statistics courses, etc.) that may enhance their professional development.
Accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of the American Psychological Association since 1993, University of Massachusetts Boston’s (UMass Boston) program in clinical psychology is based on a scientist-practitioner-activist model. The program prepares clinical psychologists who have an excellent foundation in psychological science and can translate their basic knowledge into practical applications to meet the mental health needs of children, adolescents, and adults from diverse sociocultural groups. Graduates of the program have the requisite skills to advance understanding of key human problems through research, scholarly activities, clinical practice, teaching, professional service, advocacy, and activism.
Mission Statement
UMass Boston Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program Mission, Spring 2017 Revision
Accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of the American Psychological Association since 1993, University of Massachusetts Boston’s (UMass Boston) program in clinical psychology is based on a scientist-practitioner-activist model. The program prepares clinical psychologists who have an excellent foundation in psychological science and can translate their basic knowledge into practical applications to meet the mental health needs of children, adolescents, and adults from diverse sociocultural groups. Graduates of the program have the requisite skills to advance understanding of key human problems through research, scholarly activities, clinical practice, teaching, professional service, advocacy, and activism.
Our clinical psychology training model is biopsychosocial in its scientific orientation, and places special emphasis on the roles of culture and context in understanding the complexities of multiple dimensions of human behavior and functioning. This emphasis includes, but is not limited to, bringing to the study of clinical psychology an understanding of social justice, equity, oppression, systems of privilege and marginalization, procedural and relational justice, and epistemological and methodological marginalization. This includes a commitment to training a diverse workforce of scientist-practitioner-activist clinical psychologists. Among the many skills students learn in our program, we aim to develop within them a lifelong commitment to using clinical psychology to serve the general population and to meet the needs of marginalized individuals and communities by being culturally humble and responsive researchers, mentors, clinicians, supervisors, teachers, leaders, advocates, activists, and community members. The training in our program results from an affirmative commitment by both faculty and students to engage in ongoing personal reflection and reflection upon the practices in our field—to increase our self-awareness and guide thoughtful psychological practice and relevant social justice actions.
Our educational mission is to train scientist-practitioner-activist clinical psychologists who will:
- Engage in social science research, critical scholarly inquiry, and educational activities including scholarly analysis that specifically address social and structural inequities affecting psychosocial health and functioning, including but not limited to inequities based on social class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender, disability, age, language, citizenship, immigration status, and religion.
- Provide affirming and empowering evidence-based clinical services to people across sociocultural groups and statuses.
- Serve as leaders, role models, and change-makers to promote social justice within their organizations, the profession of psychology, and other contexts. We aim to foster students’ capacity to serve as advocates and activists.
- Apply their developed awareness of how the field of clinical psychology is socially situated, reflect critically on the practices and purposes of our field, and understand how it can privilege or marginalize certain identities and lived experiences, treatment and assessment practices, and epistemological and philosophical positions.
Learning Objectives
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
To achieve these long term goals for our graduates, we have the following Learning Objectives for their time within our program. Our Learning Objectives line up with the longer term goals for our graduates related to Research (1), Practice (2), and Activism (3) above. The fourth aim above reflects our overall approach to how we approach all aspects of our training. It focuses on applying a reflective practice in critical social justice theory across all aspects of the work. In this way, it does not have specific learning objectives associated with it, but rather it serves as the lens through which we view research, practice, and activism.
Goal 1: To produce graduates who engage in clinical psychology research, critical scholarly inquiry and analysis, and educational activities that specifically address social and structural inequities affecting psychosocial health and functioning.
Objectives for Goal 1:
To provide students with:
1.1 Foundational knowledge in the science of psychology with specific attention to training in addressing social and structural inequalities with appropriate conceptual, methodological, and culturally sensitive skills.
1.2 The basic skills necessary to become critical consumers of the existing research literature, identifying gaps in the literature and developing the skills to design and implement rigorous research projects.
1.3 The skills necessary to evaluate research critically in relation to issues of contextual and cultural diversity and to design and conduct research that helps advance the field in understanding and attending to these issues.
Goal 2: To produce graduates who are knowledgeable about and skilled at providing affirming and empowering evidence-based clinical services to people across sociocultural groups and statuses.
Objectives for Goal 2:
To provide students with:
2.1. Didactic and clinical training needed to become proficient in testing and assessment theory and practice that is both informed by scientific knowledge and is culturally responsive.
2.2 Didactic and clinical training needed to become proficient in a continuum of intervention skills in a manner that is culturally informed and responsive, guided by scientific knowledge, and that considers individual assessment performance in the context of developmental and broader systemic factors.
2.3 Introductory level knowledge of competencies in supervision and consultation skills, through exposure to the literature on best practices supervision.
2.4 Didactic knowledge and skills to understand, recognize, and address the contextual factors, positionality, and power dynamics inherent in co-constructed therapeutic relationships and embedded in clinical settings.
Goal 3: To produce graduates who have the awareness, knowledge, and skills to serve as leaders, role models, and change-makers to promote social justice within their organizations, the profession of psychology, and other contexts. We aim to foster students’ capacity to serve as advocates and activists.
Objectives for Goal 3:
To provide students with:
3.1 Didactic experiences to provide foundational awareness, knowledge, and skills to engage in activism within clinical practice and research activities.
3.2 Training aimed at fostering growth to apply activist-informed awareness, knowledge, and skills across professional contexts.
Program Description
Our program coursework and training experiences emphasize:
- A biopsychosocial approach. Students learn to conceptualize and treat problems in living by considering not only problem behavior and mental disorders but also by considering the person within their physical, psychological, developmental, and social contexts. Research training gives students skills for analyzing problems from a variety of theoretical perspectives.
- Assessment and psychotherapy skills. The program trains students in a broad range of assessment and intervention skills that enable them to promote healthy adaptation, prevent the development of individual and social problems, and treat problem behavior and mental disorders. We teach students to critically reflect upon our field’s use of assessments and clinical approaches and guide students to utilize or create culturally responsive, equitable approaches to serve all their clients.
- Sociocultural context. Within a broad understanding of sociocultural factors, our coursework highlights systemic oppression and privilege, power dynamics, and social and cultural approaches to clinical psychology. We emphasize the ways in which these factors affect individual development across the lifespan, relational interactions, and social groups and dynamics for all people—with a particular emphasis on how marginalized and disadvantaged individuals and groups are impacted. As a foundation for developing this understanding, and the ability to apply it to psychological activities, students reflect upon their own personal cultural situations and positionalities to better understand the experiences of others. They examine and develop skills regarding how to best advocate for their professional values in diverse and complex settings.
- Developmental phenomena in typical and atypical pathways. In our program, students learn about the range of lifespan developmental trajectories from infancy through adulthood. This focus helps to elucidate the ways in which relationships and other environmental factors can support or hinder adaptive or maladaptive development, with the recognition that behaviors which are adaptive in one context may be maladaptive in another. Consistent with our biopsychosocial orientation, students embrace the complexity of developmental processes by taking into consideration the dynamic and transactional interplay of physiological, genetic, social, cognitive, emotional, and cultural influences across time.
- Skills toward practice. Students have the opportunity to take coursework and engage in supervised pre-doctoral clinical training experiences that can be used towards attaining licensure in Massachusetts and many other states.
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