Predicting match outcomes: Science, practice, and personality.

Abstract

Internship applicants {N = 601) recruited from Council of University Directors of Clinical Psychology member PhD programs completed surveys before and after Match Day about their academic achievements and clinical training, personality, and match outcome characteristics. Results revealed strong evidence that the single best predictor of matching among these students is the number of interview offers attained. A low number of attained interviews (6 or fewer) forecasts increased likelihood of going unmatched. Entering the match a second or more time is also associated with not matching. Additional analyses indicated intervention and assessment hours significantly interact to impact number of interview invitations, suggesting that monitoring the accrual of proportionate clinical hours (rather than focusing simply on attaining more client contact hours) is important throughout preinternship training in this sample. Although associated with only a small amount of variance, facets of personality do appear to be significantly associated with the number interview offers obtained and internship match outcomes. Finally, a significant interaction between science, as indicated by research achievements, and practice, as indicated by proportionate clinical hours, was also observed. This represents the first empirical demonstration of the Boulder model's philosophical premise regarding the training of clinical psychologists. Specific mentoring suggestions are offered, as well as recommendations for future directions in training, policy, and research.

Survey of doctoral internships in psychology offering experience in forensics and corrections.

“…Another divergence from previous literature relates to the importance of applicants' research experience. Although previous studies (Callahan et al, 2014) found that publications are a strong predictor of internship interview offers, our participants ranked research fairly low in importance; research experience, a number of publications, and quality of publications were ranked, on average, somewhere between no and some consideration. This observation is consistent with other surveys (Lund et al, 2016) that found directors did not endorse research experience as being particularly impactful in their intern selection considerations; this contradiction between what training directors say and what the data suggest supports the possibility of research experience serving as a proxy for other desirable applicant trait(s).…”

“…Findings have indicated that objective personality assessment experience is expected by internships (Stedman et al, 2018). Others (Callahan et al, 2014) have identified research presentations and publications as predictors of interview offers and match rates; however, one study found that training directors did not endorse these factors as impactful in their decision-making (Lund et al, 2016), suggesting research experience may serve as a proxy for other desirable applicant traits.…”

“The Worst Experience of My Life”: The Internship Crisis and Its Impact on Students

“…These reports of bias require additional dedicated qualitative and quantitative research. Explicit nondiscrimination policies may need to be enforced should some of these perceptions of discrimination bear out because other research suggests that factors such as race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, having children, and disability status do not significantly influence matching (Callahan et al., ; Callahan, Hogan, Klonoff, & Collins, ). Fourth, resiliencies and opportunities for growth might be explored among applicants who did not match to better help applicants maximize the time between application cycles.…”

“…A primary objective of her research is to contribute to the development of an evidence‐based approach to training for the purpose of ultimately improving the quality of psychological care (during the training years, but also to positively influence effectiveness trajectories). She has published numerous empirical studies pertaining to internship (Callahan et al, , b).…”

Racial and ethnic diversity among clinical psychology doctoral students applying for internship.

“…To maximize variability in match outcomes, the data set built for the present study pulled data from two previous studies examining This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. clinical psychology doctoral student variables and internship match rate at the height of the internship match imbalance (Callahan et al, 2010(Callahan et al, , 2014. One noteworthy change was made in the combined data set.…”