Applied Psychology

Research, Training and Practice

Rowan Bayne, Gordon Jinks

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781446290897
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this revised new edition, Bayne and Jinks expertly combine the professional and academic aspects of applied psychology. The contributing authors, all experts in their field, provide authoritative and engaging overviews of their areas of expertise and an important range of perspectives.

The book is organised into three parts. The first part is a general context for applied psychology including a discussion of questions about evidence based practice. The second part discusses practice and training in a plethora of areas of applied psychology, including all of the traditional routes (for e.g. clinical, health and educational psychology), eight ?relative newcomers? to the field (for e.g. sport and forensic psychology) and four areas not always regarded as applied psychology: counselling, coaching, careers guidance and lecturing. The innovative third part is a roundtable of expert practitioners commenting on the new directions they would like to see in their areas of applied psychology.

Applied Psychology: Research, Training and Practice 2nd Edition will be essential for all students considering a career in an applied field, either those studying applied psychology at undergraduate level or MSc students on applied psychology courses at this level.

PART ONE

Context

1

APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY

John Radford

This chapter discusses:

• the nature of Psychology as a discipline, subject and profession;
• the application of Psychology to the psychological professions, and to other specialisms and professions;
• the fallacy of distinguishing between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ Psychology;
• the public understanding of Psychology, and why it is often poor;
• critical views of Psychology;
• how Psychology can achieve wider acceptance, and why it should.

INTRODUCTION

A distinction is made between Psychology, a scientific enquiry, and psychology, the subject matter of that enquiry. It is suggested that Psychology, like other such labels, refers to three distinct entities which should be distinguished. The discipline is a group of related problems, focused on the human individual, and the methods and findings resulting from investigating these problems. This gives unity to Psychology. The subject is organization of material and resources for practical applications including teaching. The profession is a body of people practising in various contexts but based on the discipline. Professional psychologists are only a small number of those who obtain the Graduate Basis for Registration of the British Psychological Society (BPS). Some difficulties arising from this are discussed. Psychology can be and is applied in many contexts, and while there are some criticisms of this, it is suggested that a better understanding of human behaviour is fundamental to solving the many problems we face as a species.

In studying this subject we must be content if we attain as high a degree of accuracy as the matter of it admits. (Aristotle, c. 385–322 BCE, Ethics)

A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life. (G.H. Hardy, 1877–1947, mathematician)

We can tell nothing of our fellow men except by seeing what they do or say in particular circumstances … If we refuse to use observation and experiment on other human beings, we start to regard them as wicked or foolish. I think this is a serious danger, and I have no doubt that the methods of empirical psychology are socially more hygienic, or to use the older and more robust phrase, morally better. (Donald Broadbent, In Defence of Empirical Psychology, 1973)

In another memorable quotation, reported by Joshua Reynolds, Dr Johnson remarked:

There are two things which I am confident I can do very well: one is an introduction to any literary work, stating what it is to contain, and how it should be executed in the most perfect manner; the other is a conclusion, shewing from various causes why the execution has not been equal to what the author promised to himself and to the public.

This chapter is not an introduction in Johnson’s sense. Those that follow will speak for themselves, and whether his conclusion is necessary can be left to the reader. Rather, I raise some larger issues about what psychology is, and how it is or can be applied.

THE NATURE OF PSYCHOLOGY

I have in front of me a copy of The Times for today, 2 March 2011. I can find no mention of the word ‘Psychology’. But there is a great deal of psychology. There are items about gender (as it is now called, previously sex) equality, racial prejudice, problem-solving and creativity, crime, aggression and murder, war and conflict, child development, education, mass media, propaganda and persuasion, leadership and, of course, sport. All of absorbing interest to psychologists, and not only professionally.

Psychology and psychology

The useful distinction between Psychology as a discipline or enquiry, and psychology as the subject matter of that enquiry, is due to Graham Richards (1987). This can be applied to any discipline, but it is particularly apt for some. The subject matter of Chemistry is chemistry, processes that can be studied at chemical level, so to say. But those processes are not themselves part of the investigation, only its object. With disciplines concerned with human behaviour the case is different. If the task of History is to understand the past, the whole of it, then what historians have said is part of that past, and has often helped to shape it. Psychology is more extreme still, for it is itself human behaviour, which is its subject matter. Psychologists themselves, and their theory and practice, are necessarily something that requires a psychological explanation. In other words, Psychology is by its nature reflexive. So too are other disciplines dealing with human beings, Anthropology, History, Sociology and so on. But the issue is most pertinent to Psychology because it focuses (I argue) on the individual human being. The argument can be taken further. Richards (1996) suggests that the language that Psychology uses itself constitutes psychology: ‘Nobody before Freud had an Oedipus complex … nobody before c. 1914 had a high IQ … To put it bluntly, Psychology is produced by, produces, and is an instance of, its own subject matter.’ This is not, as I understand it, a social constructivist view. H. sapiens must always have had intellectual capabilities, if not an IQ.

Medical examples

Consider two medical examples (not from Richards). In former times people often suffered from ‘ague’. Today it is sometimes said that this was malaria (or influenza, or rheumatic fever). It was not. It was ague. The symptoms were real, but they were classified differently, and without knowledge of the disease entities. Malaria existed as a disease, but not as a medical or psychological reality. Similarly with schizophrenia, which did not exist until Eugene Bleuler invented it, or identified it as he would have said, in 1911 (Boyle, 1988). Since then there has been a long history of seeking to find the causes of schizophrenia by studying ‘schizophrenics’, that is, samples of persons diagnosed as such. Considerable progress has been made, though the process risks being circular. A leaflet on schizophrenia produced by the Royal College of Psychiatrists states that schizophrenia is ‘a disorder of the mind which affects how you think, feel and behave’ (para 3). The word ‘schizophrenia’ is used ‘because there is not yet a better one for the pattern of symptoms and behaviours described’ (para 2). But those symptoms and behaviours are so varied and inconsistent as hardly to merit the word ‘pattern’. For example, they may or may not include hearing voices, and hearing voices may or may not indicate a disorder. This is even more the case if one considers different cultures and periods, in some of which hallucinations of various kinds can be normal or signs of exceptional gifts, such as receiving messages from the gods. Of course, it is not that there are no such things as hallucinations, or mental disorders, rather that Psychology and its subject matter are in a constant state of interaction and creation. And much of it depends on probabilities and reasonable estimates, just as Aristotle said. There are very real consequences for treatment and for public attitudes.

DISCIPLINE, SUBJECT AND PROFESSION

Discipline

An implicit assumption is perhaps that because there is a word ‘schizophrenia’, there must be a disease entity corresponding to it. But that is just what has to be found out. A similar fallacy has often underlain attempts to say what psychological concepts ‘really’ mean, for example intelligence (Radford, 1995), and indeed what ‘Psychology’ itself is, and particularly whether or not it is a unity (Radford, 2004). ‘Psychology’ is one word, and thus there must be one thing to which it refers. I have argued, I think first in Radford and Rose (1989), that words such as Chemistry, History or Psychology commonly refer to at least three distinguishable entities, which it is desirable not to confuse. I label them discipline, subject and profession. By a discipline I mean a set of problems that appear to be related, and the methods, theories and bodies of knowledge that are created in investigating them. A discipline is not defined by a list of subject matter, but by a focus; what the problems appear to have in common. The focus is not fixed but may change over time. It may be relatively wide or narrow. The focus of History can be either. A limited focus is the recorded past; a very wide one is all that has occurred. Obviously the first is a subset of the second. The focus of Psychology could be the individual human being, or H. sapiens, or living things, but a better label for that is Biology. I prefer ‘individual’, but that can only be understood as being at the centre of the other two – three concentric circles. Every discipline is more or less closely related to others. Psychology is close to Anthropology, Biology, Sociology and History. The individual might be seen as where all of these ‘circles’ intersect. Slightly more distant might appear Geography, Economics, Statistics, while Geology seems quite a long way off, but you never know. The ‘circles’ are imaginary. Disciplines are not static, and they do not have boundaries. New disciplines constantly emerge, and it is a matter of opinion and convenience when they should be regarded as independent. They are not territories. It is impossible to say in advance where new knowledge relevant to a problem will emerge. And it is absurd to reject it on the grounds that it is not part of a particular discipline. Anything at all may, in principle, be grist for the psychologist’s mill. At the same time the focus on related problems and methods does, in my view, give unity to a discipline, however varied its practitioners may be.

Subject

I use the word ‘subject’ to refer to the use of disciplinary material for purposes of dissemination and application. Unlike a discipline, a subject is legitimately territorial.

In education or in practice, it must have space, specialized accommodation, equipment, staff, support services and so on. All these depend in the last resort on attracting students, clients or other sources of finance. Psychology has often had to fight to be considered a ‘science’ subject, or a legitimate speciality, and this is not merely for prestige but because they relate directly to funding. One has to deal with the mundane needs of a subject as much as the vaulting ambitions of a discipline. Discipline content must also be ordered if it is to be conveyed to others. This is part of applying Psychology. A library is little use without a catalogue, but any classification system must be a partly arbitrary fitting of overlapping and inter-related material into boxes. Any educational course must be a selection from what its title might suggest (and usually more than that). An honours degree in Psychology cannot cover anything like all that is available, and should also include something from related disciplines. A syllabus must be strictly defined, if only because it is a licence to examine. A student may be asked about what is in it, and must not be penalized for not knowing what is not. Books and journals must have some limits. The question then is, how to make the selection. In the case of a book, it is up to the author to defend the choice – or an editor to impose one. A practitioner similarly draws on one or more disciplines. The criterion must surely be relevance to the purposes of the education, dissemination or practice.

In education, there are three general cases. In one, Psychology is a component of training for something other than professional psychology. Teaching, social work, nursing, medicine, police work, management are obvious examples and there are many others. A second case is general, non-vocational education, such as most GCE A-levels. The third case is courses, specifically first degrees, that are preparation for a psychological career. The second and third cases overlap, due to the well-known fact that of those who graduate (major) in Psychology, only some 15 to 20% will go on to a professional psychological career. The majority have careers that may or may not involve Psychology directly or indirectly. (Former students of mine have taken up jewellery making, journalism, picture-framing, market gardening, managing pop groups, working the stock market, menswear retailing and many other trades. Some at least have said they value their degree.)

Profession

By a profession I mean a body of people who are usually but not always formally qualified, but who conform more or less to the characteristics I discuss in more detail elsewhere in this volume (Chapter 18), including a commitment to the best interests of the client, a shared basis of knowledge both theoretical and practical, accountability for what is achieved rather than for specific procedures, responsibility of the individual practitioner and autonomy of the professional group. Like a subject, a profession is legitimately territorial. It is right for medical practitioners to try to ensure that quacks are seen for what they are, and prevented from doing harm. This is, however, a double-edged weapon. It can result in rejecting new advances merely because they are not accepted practice, or have arisen through unconventional routes. Professionals must not seek to extend their control beyond their competence, and must respect the role of other professionals (which does not mean necessarily deferring to it). Protection of the public can lapse into concealment of malpractice. There must be robust monitoring systems with external input. Professions are usually linked to one main discipline, but often draw on several others. Medicine is a profession based on the discipline of Medicine, focused on the treatment of disorders, but which also draws on many others that exist in their own right, including Psychology.

Professions may be defined both informally, as above, and formally. The formal criteria for psychological professions normally include academic qualifications, Chartered status granted by the BPS and, since 2009, for seven domains of psychological practice, registration with the Health Professions Council (HPC)¹. This last is the outcome of a prolonged campaign for legal establishment, which has ended, by governmental insistence, in a more or less shot-gun wedding, inasmuch as many professional psychologists have little or nothing to do with health as such. The domains are occupational, clinical, forensic, counselling, health, educational, and sport and exercise. The effect is that no one may legally describe themselves as any of these varieties of psychologist without being registered. The generic term ‘psychologist’ is not protected, and anyone may describe themselves as one. The argument is that it would be impossible to set standards that would apply to all varieties. In addition, it was felt that psychologists in research or teaching should be able to describe themselves as such, but should not have to be registered.

APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY

‘Psychology’, then, can refer to all these things. As I have tried to show, they are not aspects of the same thing. This is relevant, I think when considering how Psychology can be or should be ‘applied’, for example to the training of other specialists. One approach to this is essentially to give a potted version of ‘Psychology’, the discipline, and then try to show its relevance. Another method is to ask what a lawyer or a medical general practitioner (GP) has to do, and then what, if anything, there is in the psychological cupboard, so to say, that could be of use to him or her. These are not absolute opposites, rather a matter of emphasis. One example of the first, to my mind, is Psychology and the Teacher, by Dennis Child (2007), and of the other, The Psychology of Behaviour at Work, by Adrian Furnham (2005). The titles themselves suggest the difference. To the question of what is relevant, we should not be afraid to say, nothing. It does not follow from the all-embracing aims of the discipline, that there is anything valuable for a particular subject or profession. Increasingly, there is, but there is still an obligation to prove it.

Applied psychologists

‘Applied Psychology’ usually refers, as it does in this volume, mainly to psychologists who work in particular specialisms. In the past, it has sometimes been used in particular for work concerned with occupations and or...