Psychology in action: A PhD program aimed at survival

Discusses the current involvement of psychology in social problems in terms of the citizen-scholar, and the social clinician. It is argued that these roles are inadequate to solve current social problems, since they either have no community experimentation, or have a naive conception of the social change process. A new PhD training program is described in which innovative social subsystems are set up experimentally in the community, evaluated longitudinally, and, if successful, implemented on a wide scale. The focus of such training is described as problem-oriented, experimental, and with a strong interdisciplinary flavor. Details of such a program at a state university are presented.