Candidates for APA President
Q1: What will you do to address the challenges of membership composition, growth and participation in APA?
To attract three constituencies—undergraduate and graduate students; former and present members dissatisfied with APA; and colleagues who have never joined—I would, among other proposals:
• Work to provide more members a greater voice within APA. I would consider increasing council representation by at-large members who are neither parts of divisions nor state associations;
• Continue efforts to apply ethical, moral and legal considerations regarding psychologists' involvement in coercive interrogations of detainees. I support a ban on such involvement;
• Create a task force to study the insurance industry's approach to psychotherapy and assessment services.
Q2: What concrete ideas do you have about how APA can better serve our early career psychologists?
I would try to accomplish three goals:
• Expand APA's effort to amend the Model Licensure Law to require a total of only one year of supervised experience so ECPs can begin earlier to earn a decent income to repay student loans and support themselves (even the proposed revision requires two years of supervision);
• Urge expansion of existing loan repayment programs, promote development of new ones and investigate whether APA could establish its own repayment programs in return for work with underserved populations;
• Offer more grant-writing workshops at conferences and determine whether APA could itself fund research grants for ECPs.
