Sub-Project 3: Understanding Faculty Views, Behaviors, and Needs Regarding Training in Religious and Spiritual Competencies

Baylor University

Investigators

Holly Oxhandler (Sub-Project PI)

Joe Currier

Clay Polson

Purpose

Sub-Project 3 will generate the most rigorous and comprehensive picture of the status of training of R/S in graduate education across the fields of counseling, marriage and family therapy (MFT), psychology, and social work to date. Addressing these mezzo-level objectives will provide our Investigator Team (as well as the professions in general) with an accurate and up-to-date picture of educators’ perceived strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and barriers in integrating R/S content into their programs.

Background

• Current understanding of graduate faculty perspectives on training in R/S is limited, if not unknown, across the fields of counseling, MFT, psychology, and social work

• Previous surveys have been limited to a specific discipline or region, utilized assessments without established reliability/validity, and/or strictly relied on responses of program directors rather than individual faculty 

• Social work is the only discipline to conduct a systematic survey of all faculty utilizing a reliable and valid instrument to measure orientation to training students to integrate clients’ R/S in practice. Results of this 2019 survey indicated:

  • Social work faculty generally held positive views toward training in R/S competencies, but were less often engaged in actual training behaviors, highlighting a gap in training that other disciplines likely face as well 

  • Modified version of the Religious/Spiritually Integrated Practice Assessment Scale for mental health care educators was a reliable and valid assessment tool 

• Recognizing that the foundation of every licensed mental health professional’s training is their graduate education, it is critical to assess and understand educators’ orientation toward equipping their students to integrate clients’ R/S in their work

Plan

Obtain a national, baseline assessment of interdisciplinary graduate faculty views, behaviors, and experiences with training students in the area of R/S integration that will support four key steps in catalyzing a cultural shift toward integration of R/S competencies:

1. Allow faculty to identify the current strengths and opportunities for improvement regarding R/S content delivery in graduate education

2. Provide a national baseline to evaluate the long-term impact of the overall project 

3. Coordinate efforts to disseminate research findings, tools, and resources generated across the other three sub-projects

4. Invite a large subset of core training faculty to reflect upon the degree to which they include course content on R/S and offer tangible steps for how to integrate R/S in their work

Focusing on the roughly 20,000 full-time graduate faculty members teaching in accredited programs of counseling, MFT, psychology, and social work, the interdisciplinary needs assessment survey will illuminate their perspectives in five areas:

• Overall orientation (attitudes, self-efficacy, perceived feasibility, and behaviors) toward training students to integrate clients’ R/S in mental health care

• Factors that help or hinder training students to integrate clients’ R/S

• Perceived openness of graduate programs to include content on R/S integration

• Current methods of delivering R/S content (either via a specific course or a curriculum infusion model)

• R/S background of faculty respondents (e.g., R/S affiliation, engagement in R/S practices)