Research is the cornerstone of training in PSI and the activity your fellowship stipend was designed to enable you to participate in. Below, we lay out the requirements, rationale and assessment of your participation in faculty research.
A. Research Requirement
Students are required to participate directly in the ongoing research of a PSI faculty member (or another Applied Psychology faculty with approval from the program director), beginning the first semester of their first year. Students are expected to allocate at least half of their time (20 hours per week) to this research training. Student’s work on their own independent research (e.g., program milestones, etc.) is not counted toward this 20 hours per week training expectation.
Starting in Year 3, students should spend a minimum of 5 hours (of the 20 hours per week) working with another research mentor within or outside of the program by approval of their primary mentor. This ensures that students are exposed to a variety of theoretical perspectives, methodological techniques, and research strategies during their training. Students are also free to transition onto new research teams with advisement throughout their doctoral training.
B. Rationale
a. The intricacies of research require consistent involvement for the development of mastery.
b. In order to develop skills and experience in multiple phases of research (e.g., study design, measurement, data collection, data cleaning or coding, and data analyses), it is necessary to become an integral part of a research team. Adding a second research team provides exposure to different kinds of thinking in the areas listed above.
c. Students are engaged in learning full-time during the doctoral training, which is ensured, in part, by the twenty hours per week research expectation.
d. The expectation serves as a benchmark for faculty and students to assess the adequacy of students’ level of involvement in research.
C. Mentorship and Research Skill Development
Student-mentor pairs will meet each semester to discuss the student activities that reflect involvement in research, and maintain regular communication on which educational goals are being met through each research experience. We have created a guideline of best practices and mentorship and advisement that we encourage student-mentor pairs to use. You can find the student-mentor guideline here. An extended list of research skills that students will develop over the course of graduate study can be found under “Skills for Intervention Psychologists”.
D. Other
Fourth and fifth year students are expected to spend most or all of their time actively engaged in research. Each student-mentor pair will determine the balance of activities across faculty-led and student-led research in these years depending on the students’ professional goals and project needs.