Practice research network in a psychology training clinic: Building an infrastructure to foster early attachment to the scientific-practitioner model

Abstract

Learning how to conduct clinically meaningful and actionable research while simultaneously training to be a competent clinician may be an optimal way to develop an early attachment to the scientific-practitioner model. In this paper, the transformation of a training clinic into a practice research network (PRN) is presented as a strategy to foster a seamless integration of clinical, training, and research facets of graduate training in psychology. With the hope of providing helpful guidance to trainers and trainees interested in building such an infrastructure, the authors describe the context in which they developed their training clinic PRN, its major components, and some of the studies that have been conducted in this network. Benefits earned and lessons learned (in terms of obstacles faced and strategies implemented to deal with them) are described, as well as general recommendations and future directions regarding the implementation and impact of training clinic PRNs.