“Community Psychology is All Theory and No Practice”: Training Educational Psychologists in Community Practice within the South African Context

Abstract

Community psychology is often viewed as the answer to many of the social and psychological problems that exist in South Africa. However, there appears to be a gap in terms of how it should be integrated in the training of psychologists. A qualitative research design was used in this study to explore how this gap can be bridged by describing the training of educational psychologists in community psychology at a university in Gauteng. Data were collected through in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with qualified and trainee educational psychologists. The interviews were transcribed and analysed for recurrent themes. The findings were demarcated into three distinctive thematic categories. In the first category, the principle of exclusion emerged as a consistent theme. In the second category, there were two major findings, namely that there was very little exposure to community psychology during the training and that most of the participants were actually self-taught in community psychology. The final category explores several recommendations made by the participants to improve the training of educational psychologists.

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