Membership

The American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP) has over 3100 currently active board-certified specialists in membership. As a national-in-scope credentialing organization in professional psychology, its membership is comprised doctoral-level psychologists who provide professional services and consultation and are licensed to practice psychology in the jurisdiction in which they practice. Completion of a doctoral degree, completion of a qualified internship, relevant postdoctoral experience, and relevant jurisdictional licensure as a psychologist are the minimum prerequisites for approval to take an ABPP board certification exam. However, through its Early Entry Option, ABPP permits psychology graduate students, interns, and residents to begin the application process at a reduced fee, submitting credentials as they are completed until full eligibility criteria are met for the selected specialty area.

Major Areas or Mission Statement

The American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP) is a national-in-scope credentialing organization that has been awarding board certification in professional psychology specialties for over 60 years (Bent et al. 1999; Finch et al. 2006; Packard and Reyes 2003). ABPP describes the value of its credential as one that “provides peer and public recognition of demonstrated competence in an approved specialty area in professional psychology” (American Board of Professional Psychology 2008). Moreover, ABPP board certification is increasingly associated with greater opportunities for career growth, including employment opportunities, practice mobility between jurisdictions, and financial compensation (American Board of Professional Psychology; Sweet et al. 2006).

ABPP is currently a unique and unitary umbrella organization with multiple specialty boards that include Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, Clinical Health Psychology, Clinical Neuropsychology, Clinical Psychology, Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology, Counseling Psychology, Couple and Family Psychology, Forensic Psychology, Geropsychology, Group Psychology, Organizational and Business Consulting Psychology, Police and Public Safety Psychology, Psychoanalysis in Psychology, Rehabilitation Psychology, and School Psychology. Many professional psychologists seek dual certifications that reflect the full scope of their specialties. Examples of these might include clinical and cognitive behavioral, clinical neuropsychology and rehabilitation, or counseling and group. Uniquely, the Clinical Neuropsychology board also offers a subspecialty in pediatric neuropsychology, though, as of this writing, other subspecialties are being considered by other ABPP boards.

For a licensed psychologist to be “board eligible,” each of the 15 boards requires that he or she meets both generic and specialty eligibility criteria concerning education, professional training, and licensure in the jurisdiction where professional services are provided. Once an individual’s credentials are reviewed and approved, the individual seeking board certification moves to the next phase of their candidacy process. In clinical neuropsychology and forensic specialties, this necessitates passing a written examination. In all other specialties, the candidates are not required to take a written exam and may move directly to the final phases in the process. For all specialties, this includes first submitting a professional practice sample. After the practice sample is approved, the oral examination (final phase) is typically scheduled. Specialty boards may also provide a “senior option” regarding practice samples submitted by candidates with at least 15 years of experience post licensure who may submit samples of their professional work such as publications, treatment manuals, program manuals, or a comprehensive summary of their professional practice, to satisfy the requirements of a professional practice sample.

With regard to both practice samples and oral exams, the candidate’s competency is assessed across various domains. These competency domains may be functional in nature and include the day-to-day activities of specialty practice, such as assessment, intervention, and/or consultation that are informed by a scientific literature base. They also include foundational competencies, such as ethics, individual and cultural diversity, and interpersonal competence, which cut across all of a specialist’s other activities. The competency model upon which ABPP board certification is based draws from several important sources such as the APA-sponsored Competencies Conference in 2002 and resulting Task Force on Assessment of Competence in Professional Psychology (Kaslow et al. 2007), and a review of competency assessment models developed both within (e.g., Assessment of Competence Workgroup from Competencies Conference – Roberts et al. 2005; Leigh et al. 2007) and outside (e.g., American Council for Graduate Medical Education and American Board of Medical Specialties 2000) of the profession of psychology.

There is a strong consensus among many professional psychologists that the American Board of Professional Psychology represents a high degree of integrity regarding specialty board certification and serves as a gold standard for demonstration of specialty competency in professional psychology. In recent years, ABPP has turned its attention to maintenance of professional competency over the specialist’s career. From 2006 to 2014, ABPP encouraged specialists to periodically review their performance to maintain quality of professional care and to serve and protect consumers of psychological services. ABPP has recently adopted formal Maintenance of Certification (MOC) procedures to standardize this process across specialty boards. Specialists certified after January 1, 2015, must successfully demonstrate maintenance of competency every 10 years to maintain their ABPP board-certified status. This requires detailed reporting of continuing education and other professional competency-related activities, appropriate for the certifying specialty board. Specialists certified before January 1, 2015, may participate in formal MOC but also have the option of waiving this requirement.

Landmark Contributions

The origins of ABPP can be traced back to its establishment in 1947 as the American Board of Professional Examiners in Psychology (Bent et al. 1999). The intention of the original board was to ensure that individuals were qualified to perform the professional service activities associated with clinical and counseling psychology. However, as professional psychology expanded its scope and depth, the organization changed its name to the American Board of Professional Psychology to reflect the expansion of specialization activities that were emerging for professional psychologists. As a result, the number of its affiliated specialty boards and associated academies has grown from 3 to 13, reflecting this professional expansion and the breadth of specialties that have emerged in recent decades (Finch et al. 2006; Packard and Reyes 2003).

Major Activities

Each of the psychology specialty boards under the ABPP umbrella has an elected trustee who participates as a member of the ABPP Board of Trustees as the overall governance group of the ABPP. Each specialty board assumes the responsibility for developing and carrying out the ABPP specialty examinations. The ABPP central office, under the management of a full-time executive officer, executes important day-to-day functions for all of the 13 specialty boards. These include generic candidacy verification of applicants, budget maintenance and accounting responsibilities, record keeping, development and maintenance of an ABPP Directory, development and editing responsibility for the ABPP website, monitoring the organization relative to ethical/legal issues, planning of conference and governance activities, and general administrative support. The primary publication of the organization, The Specialist, is published twice annually and available to all members in both electronic and printed format. The organization website (www.ABPP.org) contains important information regarding the mission, governance, and organizational documents. For the public, the website contains listings of board-certified specialists across specialties and practice jurisdictions. For interested applicants, it contains application instructions as well as other helpful information. The organization published its first book, Becoming Board Certified by the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP), in 2009. This has been followed by publication of separate guides to become board certified by many individual specialties.

Cross-References