Psychology Professors and PhDs

A PhD is a ‘Doctorate in Philosophy’, it is the highest commonly awarded academic qualification. In fact, a person who has a PhD is a true doctor. The medical use of the word 'doctor' is usually an honorary title. The PhD is basically an apprenticeship in how to be an academic, and in most countries, it is taken as the qualification required to get a job in a university as a professional academic, i.e. a professor. Psychologists sometimes also have PsyD qualifications, that is a Doctor of Psychology, and is training more intended for practice than for academic purposes.

As academics have two main functions, investigation and education, you would think that PhDs would be focused on those aspects. Unfortunately, they are not, PhD training is almost completely focused on research. It probably should include how to teach, but usually it doesn’t.

As an example, my doctoral study was in the late 1990’s at the Institute of Neurology, part of University College London. At the time, there were no classes at all in a PhD program. I had just a desk, a PC, and a supervisor (the Clinical Psychologist Dr Richard Brown), and the job of conducting enough research to form a coherent thesis. As is normal for such a thesis, it was based on multiple research studies. It is assessed in a face-to-face viva voce examination, which takes several hours. Two academics not involved with your thesis ask you to defend it, going into detail and trying to find flaws. My examiners were Dr Jane Powell and Dr Jane Riddoch. The oral examination is a tough process, it’s not uncommon for the candidate to take a bathroom break, cry for a while, and then go back in. The examiners’ decision is at best, ‘minor revisions needed’, but they can decide on ‘fail’. Some students do fail at that point, a friend of mine failed at the viva voce exam. A few others never made it that far. The whole process in the UK, if successful, takes about 4 years.

My final accepted thesis, about 80,000 words long (317 pages), titled ‘Neuropsychological Aspects of Apathy in Parkinson’s Disease’ 

In this kind of doctorate, the learning is through the research, but also from being within an academic research culture full-time for several years. The student learns how academics think, how they solve problems, as well as practical issues such as manuscript writing and conference presenting. It is therefore important where one studies, doing a PhD with world-renowned experts, will be different to doing one with relatively inexperienced or low performing academics.

In the USA, PhD programs often have lots of classes, and take much longer, often six or more years. Despite the length of time taken, in some cases the thesis may be quite minor, compared to a European thesis. Some USA PhD theses include only one study, and may be as short as 10,000 words. Others are equivalent in size and quality to European theses. Nevertheless, an important part of the PhD is still research, and the contextual learning that takes place from being in an academic environment.

In Ecuador there is a problem: there are lots of psychology students, and therefore many psychology professors. There is an expectation that the psychology professors will have PhDs, but there are few options for PhD study for people living in Ecuador. Some Ecuadorians go to Europe, Australia, the USA etc. for doctoral study. But of course, that is expensive, and realistically, grants are needed. A popular option is to take a PhD with distance study. But of course, this may not be as good an academic training as study in an actual research department. As a minimum, a reasonable quality PhD will be recognised in Ecuador by SENESCYT, and included in their online database.

Regrettably, a third option for some professors is simply to lie about having a PhD. It is not uncommon for people to simply claim to be a ‘Dr’ without any qualification to back it up. Needless to say, it is a gross violation on professional ethics for professors to deceive people in this way. If there is any doubt, then check the SENESCYT online system. That’s what it’s there for, to make life difficult for the cheats.

Not as serious, but still problematic, is the use of the post-nominal letters ‘PhD(c)’ i.e. ‘Doctorate of Philosophy, candidate’. People using these letters could be one week into a seven-year study, and still put PhD(c) after their name. Even if academics understand that a PhD(c) indicates a doctoral student, not an actual doctor, the public, and undergraduate students, probably won’t. Consequently, the use of PhD(c) is considered as being deceptive by the American Psychological Association, and actually violates their official ethics code. In other countries, such as the UK, where I studied, it would be completely unacceptable to imply that you had a PhD when in fact you did not. Even after my viva voce examination (i.e. the oral ‘defensa’) it was still many corrections and several months before the thesis was confirmed as accepted, only then could I use PhD after my name.

So, a PhD is important, but not are all equal. In my opinion, PhDs that were studied directly with a strong department, full of world experts, with a world-expert thesis supervisor are much better than most distance studied PhDs. Particularly if they are distance studied at poorly recognised institutions or with not particularly impressive thesis supervisors. Nevertheless, there are some good distance programmes, and many do include time attending the actual institute. The point is, don’t consider all PhDs equal, they are really not.

However, as I started this blog, a PhD is basically an academic apprenticeship. It matters more what the person has done since receiving the PhD. After it’s awarded, the professor should be doing something with the doctoral training, and that basically means research. And the research needs to be published in academic journals. In fact, as a rule of thumb, a good PhD should directly lead to two or three journal articles. Ten years after the PhD is completed, a professor will be defined by what they have achieved in that ten years, not by the PhD. The PhD itself should become irrelevant.

Rather than focus on the quality of academic qualifications, if you want to assess a professor, a better way is simply to Google them. This should turn up lists of their research works on sites such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Google Scholar, or their institutional webpage. Not all professors provide such information, so an absence of lists doesn’t tell you much. However, all publications in reasonable and better journals are indexed in Scopus. You can search for any professor on the Scopus free look-up service and see their publication history. A professor’s publication history is more important than their academic qualifications anyway. It doesn’t matter if a professor doesn’t have a PhD, or has one from a dubious institution, if they have proven themselves through their published research.

In summary, what Ecuador needs to improve psychology education is to get more professors who can do and publish research, i.e. academically active professors. The PhD is just the most common route that people take to become competent researchers and academics, but it is not necessarily the only route.

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This post has been about academic psychologists, i.e. those employed as professors. For a good review of issues around clinical psychologists in Ecuador, see the blog post by Dr Fergus Kane: How to Choose a Psychologist in Ecuador.