Supervision and Mentoring of Clinical Psychology Predoctoral Interns and Postdoctoral Residents

In this special issue, we are discussing issues related to evidence-based mentoring across types of training program. We have been asked to focus on topics related to such training at the predoctoral internship and postdoctoral residency levels. At these levels, mentoring primarily takes place in the context of clinical supervision, although it involves many other roles and responsibilities. We begin by placing our discussion in historical context and outlining previous research in supervision at the internship and postdoctoral levels as well as the barriers to the empirical study of supervision and its outcomes. We then describe the training settings in which we work and our approach to the practice and measurement of supervision at our site. In the absence of a body of empirical literature, we have attempted to implement a trainee-focused model of supervision that seems to fit with the overall structure and flow of our training site. We conclude with a call to the training community to advance efforts in the area of empirical investigation of our work to provide high quality supervision to our psychology trainees.