Overview
The CCAP Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (CCAP) Program focuses upon the developmental paths of children and youth experiencing psychological disorders within the contexts of family, school and community.
Attention is directed to several features including the social, emotional, cognitive, and neurobiological features of normal and atypical development; risk and protective factors that influence the course of development; the developmental impact of stressful life events; and developmental approaches to assessment, psychodiagnosis and therapeutic intervention.
Training follows a scientist-practitioner model in which an integrated series of courses and practica at the MA and PhD levels collectively contributes to the acquisition of competence as both child clinicians and researchers. Students take on cases in our on-campus clinic, the Centre for Psychological Training, and complete off-campus practica in hospitals, mental health settings and schools under the supervision of registered psychologists. In this way, students receive training to allow them to enter careers involving clinical and/or research positions in mental health centres, hospitals, schools, and the private sector, as well as careers involving teaching and research in university settings.
This training also prepares students to apply for registration as psychologists with provincial licensing boards. Our Ph.D. graduates have assumed careers in universities, hospitals, private practice, and school boards.
Faculty in CCAP pursue a wide variety of research including parent-child relational processes, shyness, adolescent relationships and dating, antisocial behaviour, autism and pervasive developmental disorders, injury prevention in children, pediatric pain, parental stress, attachment, moral psychology, stress and coping in children, eating disorders, adolescent heath risk behaviors, parental trauma history and symptoms, acquisition of literacy skills, learning disability, and developmental reading disorders.
The PhD program in Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology was first accredited in 2003, and recently re-acccredited by the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) to 2019.
We have always been proud of the training provided in this program, of the students within it, and of their accomplishments on internship and after graduation. Accreditation represents external recognition of the high quality of our program.
A Brief History of Our Program
Our program began as a M.A. program in Applied Child Psychology not long after the official founding of the University of Guelph in 1965. The program evolved to include a Ph.D. and was approved by the Ontario Council on Graduate Studies (OCGS) in the early 1990's. In 1996, an on-site clinic was established for the combined purpose of training students and providing a service to children, adolescents and families within the wider community. Our Centre for Psychological Services (CPS) has remained a valued cornerstone of the program. In the Fall of 2003, CCAP (then known as the Clinical Program: Applied Developmental Emphasis) began the self-study process and received accreditation by the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) in November 2005. The program retains it's CPA accreditation standing and represents external recognition of the high quality of the program. We adopted the CCAP name in 2018 to reflect the program’s explicit focus on training in clinical psychology within child and adolescent (rather than adult) populations. We have always been proud of the training provided in the program, the students within it, and of their accomplishments on internship and after graduation.
Importance of Accreditation
Accreditation by the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) indicates that our program meets the standards that are thought to be important by the broader psychology community for a professional psychology training program. Our doctoral program was initially accredited in 2004 and has been continuously accredited ever since. We are currently in the process of undergoing review for reaccreditation in the 2018-19 academic year. Graduating from an accredited program has several advantages for our students as only students from accredited programs are eligible to participate in the APPIC internship matching program. As well, being from an accredited program facilitates your application for licensure or registration as a clinical psychologist and many employers prefer individuals who have graduated from accredited doctoral and internship programs.
For more information on accreditation see: https://www.cpa.ca/accreditation/