Abstracts Psychology

Sport Psychology Graduate Students' Experiences with Supervision Training

by Savanna K. Ward

Through supervision, students develop the necessary skills to effectively and ethically provide sport psychology services to clients. Supervision serves two equally important purposes: to progress supervisees' professional development and to ensure client welfare (Bernard & Goodyear, 2014; Van Raalte & Anderson, 2000). The training of competent consultants starts with competent trainers, or supervisors. This dissertation study contributes to the understudied area of supervision training for ASP graduate students in the United States. The research questions and association hypotheses seek to provide information regarding the availability, utilization, nature, and quantity of supervision training for students in applied sport psychology graduate programs in the United States and to investigate how students' utilization of supervision training impacts their evaluation of their supervision skills, and the frequency of use and desire to learn those skills. This was accomplished using a cross-sectional, survey-based research design with graduate sport psychology students as the participants in addition to a comprehensive search of graduate sport psychology program accessible published online materials. Participants reported that sources of supervision training were more available and more utilized than was expected. Participants with peer mentoring experience reported on those experiences and revealed a number of elements including number of semesters in the role, number of mentees, time spent in certain supervision tasks, and the percentage of individual versus group mentorship provided. This helps to provide a picture of students' peer mentoring experiences unreported until now. Results additionally revealed that students' evaluation of supervision skills and desire to learn supervision skills was generally not significantly predicted by the amount and source of supervision training experiences acquired, but the amount and source of those experiences did significantly predict students' overall evaluation of supervisoryix effectiveness and frequency of use of skills. There are important applied implications at a number of levels including for students, graduate sport psychology programs and those associated with them, and governing bodies such as the Association for Applied Sport Psychology. Study limitations and future research directions are also provided. A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. June 3, 2022. Sport Psychology, Supervision, Supervision Training David W. Eccles, Professor Directing Dissertation; Joshua Newman, University Representative; Svenja Wolf, Committee Member; Martin Swanbrow Becker, Committee Member.