Section of Counseling and Psychotherapy Process and Outcome Rsearch,
a Section of the Division of Counseling Psychology of the
American Psychological Association

Organizational Meeting Minutes
August 25, 2002

Convener and Recorder: Ruth Fassinger

The following are the unofficial minutes of the organizational meeting of the section. The purpose of the meeting was to receive nominations for section officers and to begin discussion of plans for the section.

Attending the APA new section meeting were Ruth Fassinger, Bruce Wampold, Melissa Frey, Robert Morgan, Gargi Roysircar-Sodowsky, Cindy Juntunen, and Kara Wettersten. We first worked on nominations for officers, and then had a discussion about possible initiatives for the section. I also asked for some preliminary ideas on what divisions they might recommend clustering with for APA 2004, although you will want to raise this with the whole membership and see if there is agreement about it.

Nominations received:

Chair: Bruce Wampold (agreed to serve)

Treasurer: Bryan Kim
Pam Knox

Secretary: Rod Goodyear
Clara Hill

Members at Large: Bob Morgan (2 yr. term)
Lisa Frey (1 yr. Term)

Ideas for Initiatives:

1. Empirically-Supported Interventions
There were 3 big needs identified here: a) we need to make a place for ourselves among the interdivisional enitities and other bodies who already are involved in this; b) we need to boraden the perspective on what constitutes legitimate treatment (e.g., career, prevention, organizational interventions, multicultural outreach); c) we need to encourage inclusion of this material in research and training.

2. PR -- the section needs to be a catalyst to get psychotherapy-related organizations together and make more public what they know and do

3. Voice -- the section needs to exert some influence over the selection of editors of journals.

4. Networking -- section needs to create network for newer professionals as well as helping established professionals collaborate more (this led to a great discussion of research issues, see #5)

5. Research -- There were many ideas generated relating to research needs, with the biggest issue figuring out what to do with gobs of existing data many have access to already (e.g., counseling clinic data, taped interviews, etc.). So the ideas were: (a) to offer professional development workshops focused on how to make use of existing data that are accessible to most process researchers; (b) organizing a consortium for sharing of counseling process and outcome data in a massive data bank; (c) liaison with the new section on counseling centers (they have a large data bank and could be included in a consortium; there was also a suggestion that we could offer to analyze data for them in a program-evaluation kind of way); (d) establish liaisons to assessment-related organizations to access existing data (and invite them into consortium); (e) work on getting counseling process and outcome research included in training programs (both clinical preparation and research); (f) perhaps offer an annual award or fellowship for process research (some groaned at yet another award, but some thought this was a good idea); (g) perhaps offer scholarships for students and new professionals to take advantage of the professional development workshops or even just to attend conferences and present their work.

Clustering Suggestions:
There was agreement in the group that the divisions we should cluster with next time around would include 12 and 29 (of course) and also 42 (private practice), 49 (group), and 18 (public service?). This is probably the most urgent thing to get membership's opinion on, because Nadya will presumably be asking all entities for their suggestions soon. Since the clustering gets done by an elaborate sociogram, we will need to actively lobby the divisions we want to cluster with to select us in return, or we are just wasting our time and will get out with whoever requests us the most.