A Practitioner Scholar Program
The CSPP Clinical Psychology PsyD program in Hong Kong, offered in association with the School of Continuing and Professional Education (SCOPE), City University of Hong Kong, is designed to train doctoral level psychologists to provide psychotherapy and other applications of clinical psychology to individuals seeking such services in Hong Kong and its region. The program uses a Practitioner Scholar approach and focuses on both the Clinical Researcher and Scholar components.
The Hong Kong program aims to provide a truly international and culturally competent approach to education, drawing on the worldwide work being done in psychology and interpreting that work to benefit psychological service provision in Hong Kong and its region. The program curriculum integrates Western and Asian psychological theory, research, and application pertaining to clinical assessment and intervention with adults, children, and families. The program also provides a model of education and training for psychologists in Hong Kong that emphasizes practice, as well as the application of research to this practice, in order to prepare individuals to work within the Hong Kong mental health delivery system. This training is meant to address the gaps in mental health service delivery in Hong Kong and its region, particularly those pertaining to the treatment of marital problems, childrearing difficulties, substance abuse, domestic violence, and child abuse.
The curriculum provides training in the scientific foundations of psychology, research, clinical theory, and the hands-on skills a practitioner needs. The PsyD dissertation is meant to demonstrate the student’s ability to think critically about clinical and social issues and to make appropriate use of scientific knowledge and psychological research in professional practice.
The program is designed to be completed in four years, with a combination of semester long face to face courses, intensive face to face courses, semester long online courses, semester long blended courses (some instruction face to face and some instruction online), and supervised field work. Schedules are designed to accommodate working professionals. Teaching staff are drawn from both CSPP faculty in the U.S. and Hong Kong and the professional psychological community in Hong Kong.
Program Goals and Objectives
Students in the clinical PsyD program must demonstrate a mastery of knowledge-based, research-based, and practice-base competencies in clinical psychology. They are expected to develop knowledge and skills in the following areas in the context of the psychological needs of the Hong Kong population and the mental health service delivery system in that area:
1. Relationship: Students will be able to develop and maintain a constructive working alliance with clients including groups and organizations.
2. Assessment: Students will be able to describe, conceptualize, characterize, and predict psychological functioning of clients.
3. Intervention/Consultation: Students will be able to promote, restore, sustain, or enhance positive functioning and a sense of well being in clients through preventive, developmental, therapeutic, or remedial services
4. Research/Evaluation: Students will be able to integrate research findings and clinical literature with clinical practice.
5. Management/Supervision: Students will be able to direct and organize the services that psychologists and others offer to the public and be able to supervise other psychologists/psychologists in training.
6. Scientific Foundations of Psychology: Students will have broad theoretical and scientific knowledge in the foundational areas of psychology that provide the basis for effective practice.
7. Ethical and Legal Issues: Students will be ethical and responsible professional psychologists committed to lifelong learning and productivity.
8. Diversity: Students will have the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to function professionally and competently in a multicultural/international society.
Structure of the Degree
The clinical PsyD program consists of 120 units, including a dissertation and an internship of at least 1500 hours. Students must complete the first 60 units as one of the requirements for advancing to doctoral candidacy.
Comprehensive examinations: Two comprehensive examinations cover Psychodiagnostic Assessment and Ethics and the Law. The questions are in multiple choice format and are designed by the instructors who taught the courses. Both examinations are scheduled at the end of the second year. Students are required to pass both comprehensive examinations before they can be advanced to the doctoral candidate status.
Clinical Proficiency Program Review (CPPR): The CPPR, a requirement for graduation, provides each student with an opportunity to present a clinical case to a two person panel, including CSPP Hong Kong PsyD program faculty and clinical supervisors. The examination is scheduled at the end of the third year and is intended to give both students and program faculty an overview of the students’ strengths and weaknesses in clinical work and presentation skills. It represents an integration of coursework and field experiences.
Coursework
All students attend their courses as part of a cohort; students who begin the program together take the same courses each year and progress through their coursework sequence as a group. Each cohort has an average enrollment of 20 students. Normally, one cohort of students is admitted to the program each year. Each course consists of 3 credits, and each credit consists of 15 hours of contact time (for a total of 45 hours) plus additional hours of associated study time, including written assignments and other projects or papers submitted for evaluation. The courses are presented in four formats.
Intensive face-to-face classroom courses taught by U.S. faculty: U.S. faculty members are flown to Hong Kong and teach for 45 hours over a 2 week period. Prior to the intensive teaching sessions, students are given reading assignments on the materials to be covered. After the sessions, the students are required to work on projects or papers or take an examination. Thus, student participation in the course extends throughout the entire semester, and faculty remain in contact with students using various forms of technology (e.g., email, Moodle, eLuminate, Skype).
Semester-long face-to-face classroom courses taught by local faculty: These courses are taught by local faculty who are doctoral level psychologists with many years of experience in research and teaching. They are all familiar with the local Hong Kong culture and the local psychological profession. The classes are taught in a format similar to that of the intensive sessions taught by U.S. faculty, with the exception that the sessions are spread out over a 3 month period. They are delivered on weekday evenings and/or on week-ends.
Online courses taught by U.S. faculty: The courses are taught online using platforms such as Moodle and eLuminate. Learning takes place throughout the entire semester. Weekly assignments are given, and the students may have additional projects or papers and/or take-home final examinations. In some courses, students in Hong Kong are linked with their counterparts in the U.S. who are taking the same course.
Blended courses taught by U.S. faculty: These courses include a combination of face-to- face and online instruction. Usually faculty deliver these courses online over a 2 month period and then teach additional face-to-face sessions in Hong Kong over a 2 week period.
Practica and Internships
Two field training models are offered. Most often students take one 12 hour per week practicum for 50 weeks in their second year. During their third and fourth years they take two half time internships so they can continue to work while they obtain internship hours. Some students take two 12 hour per week practica for 50 weeks in both their second and third years. Students must earn 600 practicum hours in each year. They then take a full time internship in their fourth year. This internship is 40 hours a week for 50 weeks, yielding 2000 hours of internship training. Direct services must be 25% of the total internship hours.
Alliant provides external doctoral level supervisors for all students, for both individual and group supervision. During the practicum and internship, a Hong Kong clinical supervisor provides individual supervision. A local supervisor also provides group supervision every two weeks.
Before students are placed at their sites for practicum and internship training, the Director of Training determines that the site fits the program’s training goals and requirements. During the matching process, the Director of Training informs students about the training opportunities available and works with them and the sites to match each student with the most appropriate placement. There are over 30 agencies on the current list of practicum/internship training sites. They are spread over the entire Hong Kong island, Kowloon, and New Territories. There are several training sites in Macau and a couple in Guangzhou, China, and Taipei, Taiwan. The sites consist of social service agencies serving children, teenagers, adults, and elderly, including those who are mentally ill, have substance abuse problems, and have physical disabilities.
Dissertation
The program allows several dissertation formats. The dissertation may be an interpretive study involving a synthesis and analysis of existing literature relevant to a clinical problem and requiring the development of the student’s own ideas as to how the existing knowledge can be used to enhance clinical work. Other types of clinical dissertations include case studies, surveys, program evaluations, educational or clinical interventions, quantitative studies, and correlational studies on clinical variables. The program is designed to allow students to complete the dissertation in the third year, prior to beginning of the fourth year internship.
Credit for Previous Graduate Work
The program allows credit transfers of graduate level courses. A maximum of 30 credits of graduate coursework that is comparable to courses in the program’s curriculum and was taken from an approved institution, with at least a B grade, may be transferred. Courses taken more than 7 years prior to the application are not eligible for transfer. The students must provide all supporting documentation, including an official course syllabus and a transcript. Requests are reviewed by a faculty member who has more than 30 years of experience in evaluating credit transfer requests at the U.S. campus.
Library and Learning Resources
Library services are provided locally by City University of Hong Kong, and there is a dedicated PsyD book collection for the exclusive use of PsyD participants in SCOPE. Participants also have access to the Alliant International University collection of electronic journals and resources via the Internet.