This survey study investigated the current conditions of counseling psychology internship training and the experiences of supervisors and interns in their supervision relationships. The participants of this study were intern counseling psychologists and their clinical supervisors. The researcher contacted 158 internship programs or sites, and 95 of them agreed to participate in this study. Moreover, 360 questionnaires were distributed to 180 pairs of supervisors and full-time intern psychologists. The exclusion of unmatched individual participants’ and invalid questionnaires provided a total of 103 usable supervision dyads, and 206 valid questionnaires were collected successfully. The effective response rate was 57.22%. The questionnaire was designed to understand the variation in the allocation of training hours and assigned tasks as well as the chief complaints by clients across different training sites. The questionnaire also included items to investigate the experiences of interns while receiving supervision, the satisfaction levels pertaining to supervision for both supervisors and interns, and the theoretical orientation or approaches adopted by the supervisors. The findings of this study are as follows: (a) the intern psychologist participants in this study reported an average client load of 7.76 h per week and 285.1 h annually, and the supervision hours
were 1.5 h per week. (b) The appointed tasks and chief client complaints varied with the training sites. For instance, significant differences were found across different sites on task items such as “couple and family counseling,” “intake,” “workshop and lecture,” “mental health promotion,” and “in-class outreach.” (c) In this study, 46.2% of the clinical supervisors recruited into the current study were accredited by the Taiwan Counseling Psychology Association or the Taiwan Guidance and Counseling Association, 67.9% of them had been in practice for more than 10 years, and the experience duration of the participants as clinical supervisor ranged from 4 to 10 years. (d) The top-three most frequently adopted theoretical approaches are “experiential” (35.9%), “post-modernist” (20.4%), and “psychodynamic” (14.6%). (e) The supervisors in the medical settings were less experienced than their counterparts in the community or school setting. However, their supervision hours exceeded the hours of supervisors in the community or school setting. (f) Overall, both supervisors and intern psychologists reported a high level of satisfaction with their supervision experiences. Specifically,
50.5% of the intern psychologists reported that they were “very satisfied” with their experiences of receiving supervision, and 35% of them reported that they were “satisfied.” Moreover, 27.25% of the supervisors reported that they were “very satisfied” with their experience of delivering supervision, and 65.6% of them reported that they were “satisfied.” (g)Supervisors’ theoretical orientations had significant influence on their evaluation of interns’ performance and competence. Supervisors adopting a relational or experiential approach tend to rate interns higher on the scale than those who adopt a cognitive–behavioral orientation. The findings of this survey were then analyzed and discussed. Based on our discussion, the implications on future research and clinical training in counseling psychology are described.
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Survey on the Current Internship Training and Supervision in Counseling Psychology
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