The 2011 SIOP Graduate Program Benchmarking Survey Part 4: Internships: (570072013-005)

Welcome to the fourth installment of the report on the 2011 SIOP Graduate Program Survey. In this issue, we offer norms on assorted features of I-O program internships. As an applied discipline, I-O psychology is clearly invested in the scientist–practitioner model, and many I-O psychology programs, accordingly, see fieldwork experience as an important part of graduate training (Aamodt, 2013). Programs vary considerably, however, in the importance placed on internships, the nature of such experiences, their management, and associated requirements. Based on a survey conducted in 2003, Munson, Phillips, Clark, and Mueller-Hanson (2004) offer detailed descriptions of internships from the organization’s perspective (e.g., intern recruitment and selection, duties, supervision, feedback), and Mueller-Hanson and Phillips (2005) provide a follow-up on internships for undergraduate and high school students. Results reported here offer a complementary snapshot of internships from the perspective of I-O graduate programs, in terms of both mainstream practice and variability across programs. As in previous articles in this series, we sought not only general benchmarks but also comparisons between master’s and doctoral degree programs crossed with psychology versus business/management departments. Insufficient data are available for business/management programs on most of the internship variables, precluding norms (minimum N = 3) and comparisons involving those programs. As in the earlier articles, (a) programs outside the U.S. are excluded due to questionable representativeness; (b) online-only programs are excluded from the subgroup comparisons; (c) means, standard deviations, medians, and skewness, min, and max values are reported for continuous variables, whereas frequencies and percentages are offered for nominal variables; and (d) norms are provided separately for three “top-10” lists identified by Gibby, Reeve, Grauer, Mohr, and Zickar (2002; most productive doctoral programs), and by Kraiger and Abalos (2004; top master’s and doctoral programs, separately, based on student ratings). Owing to the low Ns for business/management programs, ANOVAs and multiway frequency analyses are replaced in most cases by independent sample t-tests and chi-squares, comparing degree types within psychology departments. We begin with basic internship features; then consider policies and procedures, intern performance, internship site locations, distinctive internship qualities of the three top-10 lists; and conclude with exploratory derivation of internship procedural dimensions and linkages with key applicant variables.