The Core Competency Movement in Marriage and Family Therapy: Key Considerations From Other Disciplines

Abstract

There is a growing movement to define competency within the field of marriage and family therapy (MFT), particularly with respect to the training of practitioners and the evaluation of clinical practice. Efforts to define competency, however, transcend the practice of MFT and much can be learned from the experiences of other disciplines. Professions such as education, law, and medicine have made strides toward addressing the complex issue of competency standards in their respective fields. This article describes some ways in which the issue of competency has been approached in other professions, as well as some common dilemmas posed by adopting a competency-based orientation, to shed light on the process of defining competency in MFT. Moreover, this article identifies some of the more useful conceptualizations, modes of pedagogy, and evaluative practices found in other professions.

Constructing Professional Identity in an Online Graduate Clinical Training Program: Possibilities for Online Supervision

“…As Miller, Todahl, and Platt (2010) point out, many professions have difficulty defining just what constitutes a competency. Furthermore, they raise the issue of equifinality, i.e., contrary to what is implied by the competencies approach, there may well be more than one acceptable path to therapeutic competence and effectiveness.…”

Competency‐Based Training: Objective Structured Clinical Exercises (OSCE) in Marriage and Family Therapy

“…It is considered by many that breaking clinical skills into individual competencies is artificial and therefore presents little meaningful information. Fragmenting clinical care into discrete items undermines holism (Mavis, Henry, Ogle, & Hoppe, 1996; Miller et al., in press). Further, idealized “textbook” scenarios may not mimic real‐life situations (Wallace, Rao, & Haslam, 2002).…”

“…There is a growing movement to define and effectively evaluate clinical competency (Miller, Todahl, & Platt, in press; Nelson et al., 2007). Great strides have been made toward articulating what constitutes core competencies in marriage and family therapy (MFT).…”

“…The competencies were developed to address several issues facing the profession of MFT. These issues include the increasing numbers of MFTs practicing in the United States, the impact of managed care limiting access to services (sometimes based on arbitrary evaluations of who was most competent to provide these services), and the impact of these competency evaluations on vendorship and other reimbursement legislation (Miller et al., in press).…”

“…Trainees are aware of the targeted competencies involved, yet are free to choose their own way to accomplish the tasks of the session (or station). One dilemma of the core competency orientation is that with an overly rigid application, it does not easily allow for creative or novel methods (Miller et al., in press). This adaptation of the OSCE allows for equifinality , a concept which states that many different origins can lead to the same results (Berttalanffy, 1968).…”