Occupational Health Psychology Training

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 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Project Summary A. Long-term Goals and Objectives of the Program The Occupational Health Psychology (OHP) graduate training program at the University of Connecticut is designed to recruit and train highly qualified and diverse graduate students from psychology, public health and nursing to become Ph.D. researchers capable of conducting multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary research focusing on the behavioral aspects of occupational health. Occupational trends (e.g., downsizing, contingent labor, longer work hours) have propelled the need for studies on occupational health psychology, which concerns the broad range of exposures and mechanisms that affect the quality of working life and the responses of workers, such as how individual psychological attributes interact with job content and work organization as well as organizational policies and practices. OHP research and practice explores interventions targeting the work environment and the individual to create healthier workplaces and to improve the capacity of workers to protect their own safety and health, while maximizing their effectiveness and wellbeing. As such, OHP fits many of the strategic goals of the NIOSH Total Worker Health initiative. B. Key Elements of the Training Program Trainees learn how to contribute to the OHP knowledge base and become highly capable researchers, who study and implement new ways of maintaining and promoting worker health and safety. The OHP concentration is integrated within the Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology doctoral training program. As such, the training program follows a scientist-practitioner model in which trainees complete 12 credits of prescribed coursework, three credits of applied field/lab research, master- and dissertation-level research, and participate in faculty research labs. All trainees complete a graduate seminar that covers principles of behavioral science, ergonomics and epidemiology and requires development of a multidisciplinary research proposal; this course is taught by core OHP faculty and an epidemiologist from the School of Medicine. In addition, trainees complete a required epidemiology course and two elective graduate courses in psychology and/or public health. This combination of course content and applied research training is designed to equip trainees with the necessary skills to address today's occupational health problems, and enable them to introduce new concepts of work organization and workplace design for enhancing worker health and productivity, realizing the true potential of trans-disciplinary occupational health research to meet both regional and national needs. C. Trainees: We recruit primarily from and also for the Psychology Department's I/O doctoral program in an effort to add extensive OHP training to trainees' more general doctoral requirements. UConn's I/O program is the only one of its kind in the New England states, making it possible to recruit stellar students for this training. The training program take approximately 5 years to complete, during which master- and dissertation-level research is completed, as well as additional research to enable trainees to be competitive in a tight job market. Trainees get jobs in academia, industry, consulting firms and governmental agencies. We support approximately 10 trainees annually (two supported with full-time, year-long stipends; the remaining with travel support for conference attendance). Students outside the I/O program can complete the 15-credit program for the Graduate Certificate in OHP, but are not eligible for grant support.