The Dorothy Booz Award For Outstanding Achievement in Counseling Health Psychology


The Dorothy Booz Black Award for Outstanding Contributions in Counseling Health Psychology is given to encourage and reward outstanding research and practice in Counseling Health Psychology. This award honors the significant role played by Dorothy Booz in the formative, developmental and continuing success of Consulting Psychologists Press/Davies Black Publishing. As a member of the Board of Directors of CPP/Davies Black, she was interested in how Counseling Psychologists and other professionals could work to enhance health and diminish disease risks among people using counseling approaches. The Award was originally funded by Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc.; it is now funded by the Society/Division 17. Announcement of the Award winner is made at the annual APA convention. The procedures to be followed in the nomination of candidates, selection of an Award winner, and presentation of the Award are detailed below.

Award Amount: $1,000

Congratulations to the 2022 Award Recipient: Betty Lai, Ph.D., Boston College


CRITERIA:

  1. The Dorothy Booz Black Award for Outstanding Contributions in Counseling Health Psychology is given to encourage and reward outstanding research and practice in Counseling Health Psychology. The individual’s primary contribution is in research and practice of Counseling Psychology focused on health-related processes and outcomes. Recipients of this award shall have made outstanding counseling health psychology contributions in one of the following domains: research, education and training, professional practice, diversity/social justice issues and leadership in professional organizations. Examples of research include: a) line of research studies, often in collaboration with several others, that has identified a new or understudied problem area related to health; b) development of new or revised conceptual models that help clarify health-related problems in terms of assessment and interventions; c) integrating scholarly contributions from more than one field of inquiry and/or practice in ways that have encouraged research concerned with health.
  2. Age, specialty area of doctoral training and years since the doctorate shall not be considered.
  3. Preference for the Award should be given to persons whose principal professional identification is as a Counseling Psychologist and who are members of the Society/Division 17; however, this is not an exclusion criteria and persons who do not primarily identify as a Counseling Psychologist and/or are not members of Society/Division 17 may be considered. 
  4. No voting members of the Executive Board of Society/Division 17 shall be eligible to be nominated for the Dorothy Booz Black Award for Outstanding Contributions in Counseling Health Psychology during the time they serve on the Board.
  5. Though the Award ordinarily will be voted annually, the Executive Board may elect not to make an Award in any given year.

PROCEDURES:

  1. A Call for Nominations for the Dorothy Booz Black Award for Outstanding Contributions in Counseling Health Psychology will appear in the Fall issue of the Society/Division 17 Newsletter or the currently used publication medium. 
  2. Nominations for the Award are to be in the form of a letter that makes the nomination (from self or other), and discusses the significance of the nominee's contributions to the science and practice of Counseling Health Psychology. In total, nomination packets should include (a) no more than three letters, one of which should be a letter of nomination (from self or other) and no more than two additional letters of support from psychologists; all letters should directly address how the nominee meets the criteria for the specific award  (b) a copy of the nominee’s vita. 
  3. The Chair of the Awards and Recognition Committee (or the Chair’s designee) will be responsible for collecting nominations and for obtaining evaluations of the nominations from the Committee. Each reviewer will rate and then rank the nominee and send both ratings and rankings to the Chair (or the Chair’s designee) who will then compute mean ratings. Based on these mean ratings the Chair will submit a rank ordered list of nominees to the Society/Division 17 Executive Board prior to the mid-year meeting of that group.
  4. Election of the Award winner will be decided by written or verbal ballot at the mid-year meeting by majority vote of the voting members of the Executive Board of Society/Division 17 who are present. The Award winner will be notified by the President following this mid-year meeting but no public announcement of the winner will be made until the Society/Division’s business meeting at the APA Convention.
  5. The Chair of the Awards and Recognition Committee will provide the winner’s name and contact information, social security number, and the name of the award won to the Society/Division 17 treasurer by June 1st. The treasurer will prepare the check and give it to the Society/Division 17 President for presentation at the Annual Business Meeting in August.
  6. After the APA Convention, an announcement of the winner will be published in the fall issue of the Society/Division 17 Newsletter or currently used publication medium, and The Counseling Psychologist.

Note: SCP’s most recent strategic plan (2019-2024) includes goals such as elevating impact of counseling psychology and supporting counseling psychologists’ advocacy to promote client and community wellbeing, equity, and justice. Our current President Reynolds stated, “Every day we strive to build a more inclusive, just, and equitable profession and ensure that our work is centered in liberation and healing to dismantle oppression in all its forms, uplift all communities who are marginalized, erased, and harmed, and transform our policies, structures, and practices so that we may all one day be free.” This work is particularly important now given multiple pandemics experienced in recent years and our continued fight to support marginalized communities.
Therefore, we invite all nominations to address the ways your nominees strived to make this change. The submission materials should address how the nominee aligns with and/or applies counseling psychology values, particularly as it relates to counseling psychology’s focus on Liberation Anti-Black Racism, Advocacy and Engagement.