Community Engagement Training and Research in Counseling Psychology

Abstract

For decades, leaders in the field of Counseling Psychology (CPSY) have called for scholars and practitioners to engage more with our communities as a manifestation of our values. However, questions remain about the extent to which our field has risen to meet these calls. This two-part pilot project is an attempt to answer those unanswered questions by evaluating the current state of CPSY’s involvement in community engagement practices and scholarship. Part 1 is a 30-year content analysis of community engagement scholarship in three flagship CPSY journals; in Part 2, early career counseling psychologists and counseling psychologists-in-training were surveyed to ascertain the extent to which they were (or are being) trained in engagement-related practices. Results revealed counseling psychology may not have effectively integrated community engagement practices into our training or our scholarship, pointing to possible areas of growth for the field.