Tracking trends: A longitudinal look at internship placements in counselling psychology in the United States

Abstract

Efforts to track trends in internship placements across time serve the field of counselling psychology in a number of ways. But this research is qualified by its reliance upon a single source of data: the Council of Counseling Psychology Training Program (CCPTP) annual survey. This paper provides a review of the concerns related to this over-reliance, and addresses these concerns by supplementing this data source with the comprehensive data collected by the Association of Psychology and Post-doctoral Internship Centers (APPIC). Findings provide a longitudinal look at the supply and demand issue concerning internship placements, track the nature of pre-doctoral internship placements across a 30-year period of time, and generally support the validity of the CCPTP data by documenting their close correspondence to recent APPIC data.

Keywords:

• Internships
• counselling psychology
• counselling internships

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank APPIC for providing access to the data from the APPIC Match. Data provided by APPIC were disguised in order to protect the anonymity of the Match participants.