Falling Between the Cracks: Intervention Training for Psychosocial Youth Epidemics

We explore the imbalance between the incidence of psychosocial problems of American youth and related coursework in applied psychology programs. A 10% random sample of such programs ( N = 108) was selected from the 1986 volume of Graduate Study in Psychology and Associated Fields . Analysis of their catalogues showed that 6.2% of courses focused on nonacademic youth concerns: 1.3% were specific to adolescence, 2.7% to substance abuse, and less than 0.5% to child abuse and family problems. Youth epidemic issues are most neglected in highly competitive programs that focus on theory and technique with less emphasis on specific problem areas. Given the pervasiveness of the issues and their damaging effects, a shift in applied psychology training is strongly indicated.