We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Invited Editorial: Professors' Research Expectations for Admission to Psychology Graduate Programs.
- Authors
Hughes, Jennifer L.; Mengyao Li; McDonnell, Erika R.; Engsberg, Elizabeth V.; Goss, Cheyenne S.
- Abstract
Students are not fully knowledgeable about what it takes to be strong applicants for psychology graduate programs and they often downplay the importance of research experience (Sanders & Landrum, 2012). However, graduate professors often expect applicants to have research skills because these skills have been found to be strong predictors of success for graduate students (Privitera, 2014). In this editorial, we first review the literature about expectations for research experience, and then we report the findings from a survey we used that asked graduate school professors about the research criteria they use to accept prospective students. Using oneway Analyses of Variance (ANOVAs), we found that faculty from PhD programs and higher ranked programs rated research experience as more important, and they expected a greater amount of research experience from applicants, a match between their research and applicants' research experience, and more independent research experience from applicants. All of our hypotheses were significant at the p < .001 level. When evaluating the subfields of psychology, we also found all of our oneway ANOVAs to be significant (p < .001), but our hypotheses were only partially supported. We found that clinical psychology PhD faculty had higher research expectations for the four areas listed above, as compared to faculty in a few subdisciplines, which were mostly housed in education departments. We also found that clinical psychology faculty had higher expectations compared to faculty from industrial/organizational psychology programs for matching research interests. Our findings could help applicants make more informed choices when applying to graduate programs.
- Subjects
GRADUATE education; EXPECTATION (Psychology); PSYCHOLOGY; INDUSTRIAL psychology; CLINICAL psychology; LITERATURE reviews
- Publication
Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research, 2019, Vol 24, Issue 1, p2
- ISSN
2164-8204
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.24839/2325-7342.JN24.1.2