Facilitating the Development of a Scientist-Practitioner Identity Position in Clinical Psychology Training: Pedagogical Implications

The research-practice (or science-practice) gap is a commonly observed and written about phenomenon in a range of applied disciplines. The current paper focuses on the research-practice gap in practitioner clinical psychology doctoral training and the struggle with identity transition that clinical researchers undergo throughout the course of their professional doctorate. In the UK, clinical psychology trainees are recruited and trained in a national context that emphasises the importance of the scientist-practitioner identity position. Clinical psychology trainees are expected to become leaders in research development within the National Health Service (NHS) and to be sophisticated consumers and producers of evidence-based research. In the course of their training, however, clinical psychology trainees are inevitably met with varied views about what constitutes evidence, the value of research to practice, and how these two domains of knowledge can and might work together. They also enter training with their own views about what constitutes legitimate ways of producing knowledge in clinical psychology and the ways in which they can and should evidence their own practice. Clinical training programmes, therefore, need to develop learning experiences through which trainees might be facilitated to reflect on and develop their identity position as a scientist-practitioner