Supervision as an Educational Activity in Clinical Psychology Training Programs: Conceptions on its Core Characteristics and Implementation

During the first stage of a broader educational evaluation study, a qualitative exploration has been conducted on conceptions that clinical supervisors hold in regard to: 1) the characteristics of clinical supervision as an educational activity; and 2) input, activities and results related to the implementation of supervision as a formative component in clinical psychology training programs. Hence, 10 clinical supervisors affiliated with a bachelor’s program in psychology and a master’s program in clinical psychology –both offered by a privately-owned university at Bogotá, Colombia- were enrolled as voluntary participants. Data were collected by means of a semi-structured interview and responses were analyzed using the NCT method (Friese, 2012). Software for qualitative analysis was also used in this study. Results include descriptors of supervision’s basic characteristics, models and ideal scenarios. Additionally, this study reveals some critical issues related to: 1) the nature of the supervision in the bachelor’s program and its similarities and differences when compared to a mentoring process (Milne, 2009); 2) the emphasis of supervision in skills training versus competence development; and 3) the divergent inputs and activities for learning and evaluation. Conducting further research aimed to a contextualized and deep understanding of the pedagogical functioning of these educational programs is needed in order to methodologically triangulate and enrich the validity of the abovementioned findings.