careers in psychotherapy AND measurement/statistical modeling

[jnine]

Hi all,

I'm finishing up my dissertation and thinking about careers that match my skills and interests. Does anyone know of careers where folks do both psychotherapy and rigorous measurement/statistical modeling? In my experience, these careers don't seem to exist. In my imagination, i'm thinking about work at a large hospital, but my impression is that folks would likely specialize in one or another.

Many thanks in advance for any insight.

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[WisNeuro]

Yeah, I literally can't think of a single one of my friends or colleagues in the field who do both. Most of my stats heavy friends are working in the applied field or I/O. Makes sense, though, more money to be made in statistical consulting than you can in providing therapy.

 

[Ollie123]

If you find one - let me know! Academic medicine is the only one I can think of that provides that combination. If you are successful with grant writing, you can largely devote time to whatever you want. It may also be feasible to get an appointment in a biostats division of the hospital and split your time between the clinic and stats work. There may be administrative type positions (quality control?) or other divisions that allow similar opportunities.

 

[Therapist4Chnge]

Academic medicine…maybe. Along the lines of what Ollie123 wrote, I think Biostats or similar as a secondary appointment could make sense. I could see that work or possibly being a stats consultant (will need to build your reputation at least locally) within an AMC. The issue w. the latter setup is it'd probably be mostly Feast or Famine with stats work. If I had two solid interests I'd want a better way to balance my work to incorporate both interests. Ideally you could find a dual appointment and split your time 80/20, as 50/50 is rarely actually an even split, so you end up working a lot more anyway.

 

[calimich]

Great question and similar to what others are saying, I've seen few jobs like this. I have similar interests and as a postdoc at a ucc, in addition to a therapy-heavy caseload, I work with our "data person" (a senior staff psychologist who sees clients and has research/stats interests/expertise) analyzing therapy effectiveness, utilization, and working to improve our overall delivery model. Here, leadership is moving toward the "data person" becoming an actual paid position. It would be something like 30% clinical 70% stats.

We are one campus part of a large public state university system and a few years back all campuses began using the same software. They say the office of the president is seeking to employ a couple full time counseling analysts to look at all campus needs. Not structural modeling, but check out the following for examples of what we're doing:

Minami, Wampold, Serlin, Hamilton, Brown, & Kircher 2008
or Minami, Davies, Tierney, Bettmann... 2009
and some of the work by Nolan Zane, although I'm not sure if he sees clients anymore

 

[deleted343839]

+1 for academic medicine. Or a quant methods faculty job with a private practice on the side. 50/50 is extremely difficult to pull off so you'd need to decide where to focus your efforts. If you really want to be doing both it's probably more feasible to focus on methods as your "day job" and do clinical practice in a smaller fraction of your time.

 

[PsyDr]

Consulting. Remember that Netflix's algorithm was created by a group of psychologists, who were trained by a well known neuropsychologist. Iirc, the prize was a few million.

 

[smalltownpsych]

Hi all,

I'm finishing up my dissertation and thinking about careers that match my skills and interests. Does anyone know of careers where folks do both psychotherapy and rigorous measurement/statistical modeling? In my experience, these careers don't seem to exist. In my imagination, i'm thinking about work at a large hospital, but my impression is that folks would likely specialize in one or another.

Many thanks in advance for any insight.

Very tough to do both at the same time. Providing effective psychotherapeutic interventions is demanding and highly skilled work that IMO would be difficult to do on the side as it requires staying on top of the current research and keeping your skills sharp. If your day job is more closely related, that makes it easier.

 

[jnine]

Thanks everyone! (including the cautionary warnings) Glad to see that there's some hope

J9