I have a confession: I don’t have the capacity to be a therapist.
I’m an advocate for mental health. I’ve read theory books and journal articles for fun. I’ve personally benefitted from therapy, and I try to be a reliable support for my friends and family. But sitting across from strangers, day after day, and helping them through some of their most troubling experiences? I know I’d burn out quickly in that position.
But I care about this field. So, I asked myself, “If you’re passionate about mental health care but you can’t provide it yourself, what else can you do?” That’s how I got into behavioral health workforce research. My work supports and promotes the people who are providing direct mental health care. In other words, I get to help the people who are helping people.
What is behavioral health workforce research?
Behavioral health workforce research entails analyzing everything about the professionals providing behavioral health services: their education, their training, their treatment modalities, their work environments, the state and federal policies impacting them, etc.
Work like this is being done around the country. Professional associations gather these data to advocate for their members, grant-funded academic centers gather these data to aid in workforce planning policies, and state and federal governmental bodies do this work to help plan their economies and meet care demand. Reports produced by any of these parties can better illustrate how workforce distributions are directly related to population health outcomes. For a few examples of the types of reports produced by the APA, see these publications from the Center for Workforce Studies
Digging into data
Say, for example, you wanted to map the number of psychologists in every state. Seems simple. How would a behavioral health workforce researcher do it?
Since professional licenses are regulated at the state level, you could leverage states’ licensing data for accurate and up to date estimates of the number of active providers. This is one source that the American Psychological Association used when creating online dashboards allowing users to compare the number of psychologists and certain population health metrics by state.
But, because we’ve worked with the data, we know they have limitations. Some psychologists practice in multiple states, meaning we could overestimate the size of the workforce unless we deduplicate our datasets. States also set their own standards for licensure and develop their own systems for maintaining it, meaning the data we can gather, if available at all, often lacks standardization.
We have ways around these limitations. We can merge state licensing data with other trusted datasets to patch holes or clean entries. We can study state laws and regulations to know exactly how they define their professions, allowing for easier comparison between states. We could even issue our own survey to gather primary data about the workforce.
While mapping the number of psychologists across the country might seem simple, researchers in this field know it’s not that easy. Although I shared two examples of how we’ve worked around limitations for one source of data, there are more sources of data, each with their own unique limitations. Learning how to leverage these tools is the bread and butter of a behavioral health workforce researcher.
It’s complicated, but we like it
Studying the behavioral health workforce is tricky and requires a diverse set of skills that no single degree program provides. This is why we create multidisciplinary teams of subject matter experts, researchers, data scientists, IT professionals, statisticians, communicators, and more. All researchers bring their own strengths to the work, and they borrow the strengths of others as needed.
Workforce researchers are rigorous data and social scientists, digging through datasets, peer-reviewed journals, and policy language alike. We’re creative problem-solvers, leveraging tools that already exist (like public federal datasets) to their maximum extent, while also developing new ones and conducting our own surveys. And we’re advocates, sharing the information we’ve gathered through multiple mediums in order to benefit the workforce. We might not directly interact with patients, but by helping to inform and shape the conversations around providers, we can do our part to contribute to better health outcomes for our communities.
We’d love to have you in our field because your skills, regardless of what they are, can contribute to this valuable area of research.
About the author
Cory Page is a researcher currently working at the Center for Workforce Studies within the American Psychological Association. He received his Master of Public Health and Master of Public Policy degrees from the University of Michigan.
