Handling Disparate Information in Trainee Evaluation

Handling Disparate Information in Trainee Evaluation Case Analysis

Read the attached “Case 7 Appendix: Handling Disparate Information for Evaluating Trainees” 

Respond to the following in a minimum of 450-words: 

Why this is a dilemma?
Which aspirational principle or ethical standard is relevant to this case? How does this issue affect the practice of professional psychology?
Provide an analysis of what the APA Ethics Code would suggest as a resolution to the dispute. 

Case 7. Handling Disparate Information for Evaluating Trainees

Rashid Vaji, PhD, a member of the school psychology faculty at a midsize university, serves as a faculty supervisor for students assigned to externships in schools. The department has formalized a supervision and evaluation system for the extern program. Students have weekly individual meetings with the faculty supervisor and biweekly meetings with the on-site supervisor. The on-site supervisor writes a midyear (December) and end of academic year (May) evaluation of each student. The site evaluations are sent to Dr. Vaji, and he provides feedback based on the site and his own supervisory evaluation to each student. The final grade (fail, low pass, pass, high pass) is the responsibility of Dr. Vaji. Dr. Vaji also teaches the spring semester graduate class Health Disparities in Mental Health. One of the course requirements is for students to write weekly thought papers, in which they take the perspective of therapy clients from different ethnic groups in reaction to specific session topics. Leo Watson, a second-year graduate student, is one of Dr. Vaji’s externship supervisees. He is also enrolled in the Health Disparities course. Leo’s thought papers often present ethnic-minority adolescents as prone to violence and unable to grasp the insights offered by school psychologists. In a classroom role-playing exercise, Leo plays an ethnic-minority student client as slumping in his chair, not understanding the psychologist, and giving angry retorts. In written comments on these thought papers and class feedback, Dr. Vaji encourages Leo to incorporate more of the readings on racial/ethnic discrimination and multicultural competence into his papers and to provide more complex perspectives on clients. One day during his office hours, three students from the class come to Dr. Vaji’s office to complain about Leo’s behavior outside the classroom. They describe incidents in which Leo uses derogatory ethnic labels to describe his externship clients and brags about “putting one over” on his site supervisors by describing these clients in “glowing” terms just to satisfy his supervisors’ “stupid do-good” attitudes. They also report an incident at a local bar at which Leo was seen harassing an African American waitress, including by using racial slurs. After the students have left his office, Dr. Vaji reviews his midyear evaluation and supervision notes on Leo and the midyear on-site supervisor’s report. In his own evaluation report, Dr. Vaji had written, “Leo often articulates a strong sense of duty to help his ethnic minority students overcome past discrimination but needs additional growth and supervision in applying a multicultural perspective to his clinical work.” The on-site supervisor’s evaluation states that Leo has a wonderful attitude toward his student clients. . . . Unfortunately, evaluation of his multicultural treatment skills is limited because Leo has had fewer cases to discuss than some of his peers, since a larger than usual number of ethnic minority clients have stopped coming to their sessions with him. It is the middle of the spring semester, and Dr. Vaji still has approximately 6 weeks of supervision left with Leo. The students’ complaints about Leo are consistent with what Dr. Vaji has observed in Leo’s class papers and role-playing exercises. However, these complaints are very different from Leo’s presentation during on-site supervision. If Leo has been intentionally deceiving both supervisors, then he may be more ineffective or harmful as a therapist to his current clients than either supervisor has realized. In addition, purposeful attempts to deceive the supervisors might indicate a personality disorder or lack of integrity that, if left unaddressed, might be harmful to adolescent clients in the future.

Ethical Dilemma:

Dr. Vaji would like to meet with Leo to discuss, at a minimum, ways to retain adolescent clients and to improve his multicultural treatment skills. He does not know to what extent his conversation with Leo and final supervisory report should be influenced by the information provided by the other graduate students.