Providing Sexuality Training for Psychologists: The Role of Predoctoral Internship Sites

Abstract

Sexuality education positively impacts health service psychologists’ ability to address sexuality, a vital component of overall health and well-being. There is little information about the integration of sexuality into the applied, fieldwork components of psychologists’ training. We surveyed 139 representatives of APA-accredited doctoral internship programs to assess sexuality content during internship training. Participants completed a survey assessing content integration of 12 domains specific to human sexuality. The most endorsed training related to sexual orientation and gender identity; sexual behavior, sexual ethics, and sex therapy were infrequent in the internship training curriculum. Implications for research, practice, training, supervision, and advocacy are discussed.

Keywords:

• Sexuality
• training
• doctoral training
• internship
• health service psychology

Disclosure statement

This project did not receive any funding and the authors have no conflicts of interest to report.

Data availability statement

Raw data, with the exception of qualitative responses, which may have been identifying, are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/d9nt5/?view_only=b0bcd983f08c4b55be3fd30b3b514894).