The Image of Psychology Programs: The Value of the Instrumental–Symbolic Framework

ABSTRACT

As competition for funding and students intensifies, it becomes increasingly important for psychology programs to have an image that is attractive and makes them stand out from other programs. The current study uses the instrumental–symbolic framework from the marketing domain to determine the image of different master's programs in psychology and examines how these image dimensions relate to student attraction and competitor differentiation. The samples consist of both potential students (N = 114) and current students (N = 68) of three psychology programs at a Belgian university: industrial and organizational psychology, clinical psychology, and experimental psychology. The results demonstrate that both instrumental attributes (e.g., interpersonal activities) and symbolic trait inferences (e.g., sincerity) are key components of the image of psychology programs and predict attractiveness as well as differentiation. In addition, symbolic image dimensions seem more important for current students of psychology programs than for potential students.

Keywords:

• education
• image
• instrumental–symbolic framework
• marketing
• psychology

Notes

¹Data collected by the university's student administration office indicate that 93.12% of the students obtaining their academic bachelor's degree in psychology at the end of the year in which our research was conducted actually started in one of the three corresponding master's programs in psychology at the same university the next year.

²When these analyses were repeated with the image dimensions entered in the reverse order, the symbolic dimensions accounted for 24.8% of incremental variance in potential students’ attractiveness perceptions beyond the control variables, F(5,106) = 7.01, p <.001, with prestige as the only significant predictor (β =.38, p <.001). In the final step, the instrumental dimensions explained 25.3% of additional variance, F(4,102) = 12.96, p <.001, with interpersonal activities and task diversity as positive predictors, whereas prestige was no longer significant (see final step in Table 2).

³When these analyses were repeated with the image dimensions entered in the reverse order, the symbolic trait inferences explained 42.3% of the variance in current students’ attractiveness perceptions beyond the control variables, F(5,58) = 9.05, p <.001, with sincerity (β =.37, p =.001), innovativeness (β =.35, p =.005), and robustness (β = −.40, p =.001) as significant predictors. In the final step, the instrumental attributes accounted for 11.8% of incremental variance, F(4,54) = 3.75, p =.009, even though none of the individual attributes reached statistical significance (see final step in Table 2).