Training Goals and Objectives

Students engage in coursework, complete program milestones, and work collaboratively with faculty mentors on a range of activities in these research areas, including study design, data collection and analysis, manuscript preparation, conference presentations, policy briefs, evaluation activities and fundraising. Our curriculum and training structure is developed to foster a set of overarching professional development goals and specific training objectives. 

Overarching Goals

The overarching goals of training in the PSI program are to promote students’ capacity to: 

1. Build content knowledge base to understand and improve human development in social context;

2. Develop methodological skills that enable the effective assessment of and analysis of change over time and within and across levels of human ecology;

3. Acquire abilities to apply psychological and social science principles to the understanding of social settings, social/cultural/economic contexts, and psychological, social and policy interventions;

4. Attain abilities to conceptualize, interpret, evaluate and disseminate evidence-based psychological, social and policy interventions; and

5. Develop the ethical, interpersonal, organizational and technical capacities to undertake high-quality professional work in psychology and social intervention.

Training Objectives

A set of specific, curricular, experiential and cross-cutting training objectives underlie the above overarching goals:

Curricular Training Objectives

1. • Knowledge of core theories of change

   • Knowledge of development and prevention sciences

   • Knowledge of psychometrics and ecometrics (measurement at extra-individual levels of analysis)

   • Knowledge of theory of behavior in settings

   • Knowledge of policy approaches

   • Knowledge of interdisciplinary theory and research perspectives

   • Knowledge of quantitative and qualitative methods and analyses (i.e., causal inference, missing data, growth curve modeling, HLM, qualitative and mixed methods)

   • Knowledge of linking research questions to appropriate methods (design and analysis)

   • Knowledge of ethical standards in research and intervention

   • Identification and development of expertise in chosen area of specialization

Experiential Training Objectives

1. • Understanding issues related to social inequality and social justice

   • Experience in research process from start to finish (i.e., conceptualization, linking research questions to appropriate methods, sampling, measurement development, data collection, study implementation, design and analysis, presentation of findings, discussion of implications, IRB process).

   • Experience conducting quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods analyses

   • Experience conducting and managing research

   • Experience presenting papers, manuscript preparation and submission

   • Experience reviewing: manuscripts and/or grants

   • Experience in grant writing

   • Experience in intervention science and/or policy

   • Experience in consultation, advocacy, community organization, and/or other strategies and tactics of intervention

   • Experience teaching

   • Experiences to build personal and professional skills, including:

     • Ethical and professional conduct    

     • Communication and collaboration skills

     • Time management/organization skills/goal setting

     • Comfort with uncertainty

     • Positioning oneself to be competitive in academic or other chosen field

     • Developing expertise in substantive specialty area

Cross-Cutting Training Objectives

• Cultural competence

• Critical and analytic thinking, including synthesis and critique of research findings

• Intellectual initiative