Supervision in professional geropsychology training: Perspectives of supervisors and supervisees.

Supervised clinical experience is a core feature of training to develop competencies for professional geropsychology practice. Whereas there is a rich psychology supervision literature, virtually no research has been conducted to inform geropsychology supervision practice in particular. In this descriptive study, 32 licensed geropsychology supervisors and 18 doctoral geropsychology supervisees responded to an online survey that posed both Likert-scaled and open-ended questions about rewards, struggles, and methods of supervision in geropsychology training. On average, supervisors perceived supervisees to struggle more with a range of knowledge/skills than supervisees perceived themselves to struggle. Both supervisors and supervisees rated observational and modeling supervision methods to be most helpful; supervisees rated exploring diversity considerations and supervisor disclosure of their own clinical experiences to be relatively more helpful supervision methods than did the supervisors. Study results highlight both geropsychology-specific and more general psychology supervision considerations, including the importance of supervisors helping trainees to develop "metacompetence" regarding their knowledge and skills and development of resources to help geropsychologists enhance their own supervision competencies in this field.