Evaluation of psychology graduate programs and their teaching staff in Turkey
Creators: name: Çoksan, Sami
name: Yaşın Tekizoğlu, Fatma
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Other Psychology
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology
subject: Graduate programs
subject: psychology education

description: Psychology is one of the most popular disciplines in Turkey, as in the rest of the world, in recent years. On the other hand, there is no law regulating the activities of psychologists in our country. As such, individuals who do not have competency in the field of psychology can easily pretend to be as an expert. Therefore, while the popularity of psychology directs universities to open master's or Ph.D. degree programs, the lack of a professional law leads these programs to be run without any control mechanism. Based on this information, the present study is aimed to examine the quantity and quality of graduate programs in the field of psychology in Turkey. In addition, the lack of official data on these programs by the Council of Higher Education reveals the necessity and importance of this study. In this study, we have four main objectives: 1) To determine the number of universities with graduate programs in psychology in Turkey, 2) To determine the number of psychology graduate programs in Turkey, 3) To examine the areas of expertise of faculty members involved in psychology graduate programs in Turkey. 4) To examine psychology graduate programs not included in psychology departments and the characteristics of these departments. Since an exploratory study will be conducted within the scope of this research, no hypothesis(s) has been determined for quantitative data. The study sought to answer the following questions: Research Question 1: To examine the number of universities with psychology graduate programs in Turkey. a) How many universities in Turkey have psychology master's programs? b) How many universities in Turkey have psychology Ph.D. programs? Research Question 2: To examine the number of psychology graduate programs in Turkey. a) How many psychology master programs are there in Turkey? b) How many master programs are there for each subfield of psychology in Turkey? c) How many psychology Ph.D. programs are there in Turkey? e) How many Ph.D. programs are there for each subfield of psychology in Turkey? Research Question 3: To examine the areas of expertise of faculty members involved in psychology graduate programs in Turkey. a) How many master programs are carried out by experts in the field of Psychology? b) How many Ph.D. programs are carried out by experts in the field of Psychology? c) How many master programs are not carried out by experts in the field of Psychology? What are the expertise areas of the faculty members in these programs? d) How many Ph.D. programs are not carried out by experts in the field of Psychology? What are the expertise areas of the faculty members in these programs? Research Question 4: To examine psychology graduate programs that are not within the departments of psychology and the characteristics of these departments. a) Although there are subfields of psychology, how many master programs are not within the psychology department? a) Which departments do these programs belong to? b) Although there are subfields of psychology, how many Ph.D. programs are not within the psychology department? a) Which departments do these programs belong to? In order to obtain the data set, we will create to examine the research questions, we first examined the list of universities in Turkey published by YÖK (The council of higher education of Turkey). According to this list, there are 206 universities in Turkey in the 2020-2021 academic year, two of which do not carry out the education process. Then, by examining the web pages of all institutes of all universities and the web pages of psychology departments, if any, we determined which universities have graduate programs in psychology subfields. We saw that psychology graduate programs were opened in at least one of the subfields stated by the American Psychology Association in a total of eighty universities. We reviewed the academic staff of these programs or the departments they are associated with, again through the website of the program or department. If there is no academic staff information on the website, or it is missing or outdated, we have identified the faculty members who have staff in the relevant program in the YÖKAKADEMİK database which is a database where YÖK shares various data on all academics who work in a Turkish university. In order to determine in which field these faculty members are experts, we researched which doctoral program each faculty member graduated from. For this, we examined the web page of the relevant department and the YÖKAKADEMİK database. If we could not obtain data on the field of specialization of the faculty member from these two sources, we examined the subfield in which the relevant faculty member indexed the thesis in the YÖKTEZ database, which is a database where YÖK shares various data on the master or doctoral thesis of many academicians and learned what the field of specialization was accordingly. Finally, we aim to examine the research questions using the dataset we obtained at the end of this process. We will use Jamovi 1.6.23 for all descriptive statistics.