Scientist-Practitioner Model in Psychology Essay

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Since its formulation almost half a century ago, the scientific practitioner model (SP) has been a major influence in the professional training of psychology in English-speaking countries such as the UK, USA and Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The model combines the service orientation of the practitioner with the academic orientation of the scientist so as to provide a form of training that is unique in the human and health service professions. The scientific practitioner model of training and education in psychology, therefore, is an integrative approach to science and practice where each of them must inform each other continually.

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It is clear that the scientific practitioner is not just to read so as to prepare scientists and practitioner psychologists but to read and integrate these roles so that the practice by the psychologist is informed by the method and content of the psychological science (Leong & Zachar, 1991).

According to (Martin, 1989) &(Nickson, 1990), the origin of the SP model can be traced back to 1949 at a conference that was held in Boulder, Colorado. The conference brought together representatives from mental health services and universities under the auspices of the National Institute of medical health and the American Psychological Association for discussing the appropriate training models for developing professionals in clinical psychology.

The model lacked specifics and there were difficulties in its implementation which coupled with the federal government funding of service delivery and research led to a dilution of the model in 1973 at the Vail conference (Schneider, 1990). In this conference, emphasis was placed to differentiate training of professionals and scientists and there was a reaffirmation of the scientific- practitioner as the professional training objective in psychology (Larner, 2001). Institutions are now moving to integrate science into practice components although the professional training programs which do not give effect to the SP model have continued (Belar & Perry, 1992).

Although the model is widely accepted, (Stricker, 2000; Stricker & Trierweiler, 1995) views that is not universal as it has been criticized on several grounds. The psychology of science underpinning the model is now out of date, it fails to pay regard to the tacit knowledge of the medical practitioner, there has been the death of suable knowledge which has been provided by the psychological science and finally, the professionals trained with the application of the model do not perform as scientists just as the low publication rates indicates (McHugh, 1994).

Henriques contended that the source of the scientific-practitioner gap is due to the failure of defining psychology. He further contends that this failure leads to many clinicians being reluctant to embrace cognitive behavior therapy which is a conceptually muddled oxymoron just as Henriques correctly observed. The principal origin of the SP does not lie in the absence of a specific definition of psychology but in the different approaches of researchers and some clinicians in the process of acquiring knowledge. (McHugh, 1994) precisely argued that most of the split between science and practice in psychiatry and psychology can be traced to the sharp difference found between two epistemic attitudes; romanticism and empiricism.

The empiricists believe that the question which regards nature is settled best by the scientific evidence, while on the other side the romantics believe that the best way to settle such questions is by intuition. Even though there are times when the research evidence and the intuition yield similar answers, acrimonious splits often ensure when the two diverge. Although (Meehl 1954) demonstrated that the scientific evidence almost and always trumps or in the worst scenarios matches the subjective clinical judgment, many of the practitioners who come from the romantic tradition have continued to rely on clinical judgment even in the cases when there is an available well-validated statistical formula. There is clear evidence to believe that the SP gap is mostly traceable to a more fundamental rift between the empirical traditions and the romantic traditions (Simionato, 1991).

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A survey which was conducted by (Nunez, Poole & Memon, 2003) showed that the majority of clinical psychologists believe that the alternative ways of knowing in which the scientific knowledge is not relevant should be supported and valued in the practice of clinical psychology. Some of the nonclinical psychologists however hold the view that there is an unlikelihood that a sophisticated integration of behavior and cognitive perspectives are likely to bring back the extreme romantics into the empirical fold. According to (Perez, 1999), this is because most of the extreme romantics have rejected the assertion that the scientific evidence which includes the controlled findings on the efficacy of the behavioral as well as the cognitive behavior therapies should at all be the ultimate arbiter of psychological disputes which exists.

Therefore, The principle solution to the SP debate does not lie in the psychology definition but lies in more rigorous education and training of the aspiring psychologists in the scientific methodologies as well as in the philosophy of science (Lilienfeld, Lynn & Lohr, 2003). To narrow the scientific-practitioner gap which is growing, future clinical scientists must be trained on how to appreciate the proper places of romanticism as well as empiricism within science. Once the rift which lies between romantics and the empiricists disappears, then the need for a specific definition of psychology will also be distinct (Schneider, 1998).

Psychological science is basically a by-product of cultural modernism. The modernist world view which is essential to common practices of psychological science is individual knowledge, the objective world, and language. In individual knowledge, a western cultural history of modernism is traced to the period when culture moved from the dark ages into enlightenment which was a historical watershed owing to the dignity that its scholars granted individual minds. It was not necessary to bend to the totalitarian force of religious or loyal decree as it was proposed that their lies abounded and sacred sanctuary of mind governed by autonomous capacities for conscious and careful observation and rational deliberation in each human being and the individual thought is the only one which provides a foundation for all the rest (John, 1998a).

Individual knowledge looks at language function in science and culture where words are seen as signs of internal conceptions and marks for the idea within an individual’s mind. Therefore if an individual mind acquires knowledge and language conveys the message to others, the language is then said to be the bearer of truth.

Postmodernism changes individual reason to communal rhetoric where language is seen as a system in itself that outlives and precedes the individual therefore speaking of the rational agent is like participating in an already constituted system. (Derrida, 1976; Merson, 1994). Private rationality is therefore a form of cultural participation which is removed from its immediate relationship exigencies. Application of this idea to scientific knowledge makes an individual seem rational if he/she adapts discourse code which is common to his/her particular community of science (Nelson, Melgill & McCloskey, 1987; Simons, 1990). It changes objective to a socially constructed world where there is no means of declaring the world as being out there or in here as reflected subjectively since language is needed. Matter and mental processes are constituents of language systems therefore speaking of the material world and causal relations is to participate in a textual genre or to draw from an immense repository of intelligibility which forms a constitution of a certain cultural tradition (Gergen, 2000).

Postmodernism changes language from a truthful picture to pragmatic practice where it sees language as the child of the cultural process but not the mind. A person’s description of the world is not the outward expression of the inner mirror of the mind nor what researchers report in books and journals or map corresponding to nature’s contours. Rather, human relationships with each other and the world generates language of description as well as explanations.

In conclusion, the SP model reflects what might be called the modernist view of science as it assumes that science is special as a way to obtain knowledge, and knowledge that is produced by other means other than science does not seem to be true. The Boulder model is said to have a fatal flaw that distorted the development of clinical psychology up to now. Critiques of the modernist view of science assume that scientific knowledge should be a privilege to practitioners who are undertaking the work. Although there is a general agreement that the Scientific practitioner model represents the best practice in professional psychology as it might be called, the view is not universal as it has been criticized on fundamental grounds and on grounds that its interpretation is too narrow.

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References

Belar, C.D. &Perry, N.W (1992), national conference on scientist -practitioner education and training for the professional practice of psychology, American psychologist, 47, 71-75

Derrida, J. (1976), of grammatology, John Hopkins University press, Baltimore.

Gergen, K.J, (2001), psychological science in the post modern context, American Psychologist.

John, I, (1998b), some reflections on Cotton’s response, Australia psychologist.

Perez, J.E. (1999), clients deserve empirical supported treatments not romanticism, American Psychologist, Yale University.

Larner, G, (2001), some reflections on Cotton’s response. Australia psychologist.

Leong, F.T.L. & Zachar, P. (1991), development and validation of the scientist practitioner inventory for psychology, journal of counseling psychology.

Lilienfeld, S.O.; Lynn, S.J & Lohr, J.M. (2003), science and pseudoscience in clinical psychology, Guilford, New York.

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Martin, PR, (1989), the scientist-practitioner model and clinical psychology, Australian psychologist, 24, 71-92.

McHugh, P.R. (1994), psychotherapy awry. American Scholar, 63, 17-30.

Meeh, P.E, (1954), clinical versus statistical prediction, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

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Nelson, J.S.; Melgill, A. & McCloskey, D.N, (1987), the rhetoric of the human sciences, University of Wisconsin press, Madison.

Nixon, M, (1990), professional training in psychology, American Psychologist, 45, 1257-1262.

Nunez, N.; Poole, D.A. & Menon, A. (2003), psychology’s two cultures revisited, The scientific review of mental health practice, 2, 8-19.

Schneider, S.F, (1990), psychology ate the crossroads, American psychologists, 45, 521-529.

Schneider, S.F, (1998), Towards a science of the heart, American psychologists, Say brook Institute.

Simionato, (1991), the scientific practitioner model and its critics, Australian psychology.

Simon, H, (1990), the rhetoric turn: invention and persuasion in the conduct of inquiry, university of Chicago press, University.

Stricker, G, (2000), the scientific practitioner model, American Psychologist.

Stricker, G, & Trierweiller, S.J, (1995), the local clinical scientist, American Psychologist.

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IvyPanda. 2021. "Scientist-Practitioner Model in Psychology." October 25, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/scientist-practitioner-model-in-psychology/.

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