ABSTRACT
Over the past several years the first author has used this exercise to begin his introduction to clinical psychology class. The responses he has gotten have been extremely interesting, ranging from the bluntly honest (“Clinical psychology is . . . I have absolutely no clue”) to the dramatic (“Clinical psychology is searching for clues, analyzing backgrounds, tying together leads, hopefully concluding with somewhat of an answer to the problem-a detective of the mind, if you will”). Organizing students’ responses to this incomplete sentence exercise into various categories has illuminated a picture of how clinical psychology is perceived by this sample of undergraduates. Far and away, most students associate clinical psychology with some type of therapeutic activity. Fully 79 percent of the responses identify clinical psychology as a field that is involved in psychological treatment. The most common type of response (44 percent), in fact, is to define clinical psychology in terms of therapy. The second most common type of response (35 percent) also emphasizes therapy but includes one or more other endeavors (e.g., research, assessment, diagnosis). A minority of students define clinical psychology as a research or scholarly discipline (10 percent).
