Society for Personality Assessment

• Home
• SPA Foundations
• Charitable Contributions Categories

SPA Foundations - Charitable Contributions Categories

The Society for Personality Assessment Foundation has been designated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation. Therefore, donations can be deducted as a charitable contribution on tax returns. Please consider donating to one or more of the options listed below.

Student Travel Grants: The Board of Trustees has established the Student Travel Grants to help students attend the SPA Annual Meetings to present their work. The SPA Board considers this to be a very important activity in a student’s development. A copy of the Student Travel Grant Guidelines and Application can be found under the SPAGS tab.

Mary Cerney Award: This Award is given to the best personality assessment research paper prepared by a student over the previous year. The student is expected to be present at the SPA Annual Meeting to receive the award. The student receives a certificate, $300 towards their transportation to the Annual Meeting, one night’s lodging, and his or her registration fee for the meeting is waived. A copy of the Mary Cerney Award Guidelines can be found under the SPAGS tab.

Dissertation Grant Awards: The SPA Dissertation Fund has been established to assist graduate students to cover the costs of conducting dissertation research in the field of personality assessment. A contribution to this award will help a deserving graduate student to better conduct his or her dissertation research,contribute to the development of knowledge in our field, and help insure that new psychologists continue to manifest an interest in assessment. A copy of the Dissertation Grant Guidelines can be found under the SPAGS tab.

Exner Research Scholar Award: Earnings from the Exner Research Fund will be used to defray the research costs of a deserving young investigator, who will be selected annually to be the Exner Scholar. A copy of the Exner Research Scholar Criteria can be found under the SPAGS tab.

Utility of Assessment Research Project: The Board of Trustees feels there is no more important task that SPA Foundation could address at this time than the funding of research in this area.

• Contributions form

 

UTILITY OF ASSESSMENT RESEARCH PROJECT

The 2009-2010 UAR-funded project is An Investigation of Personality Assessment with Challenging Psychotherapies, by Steven R. Smith, Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara. A brief description follows.

There are times in all forms of psychotherapy when patients and therapists feel “stuck,” challenged, and that the work is not progressing as well as might be hoped. Such challenges may be due to patient factors, therapist factors, or the match between them. The purpose of this study is to investigate the utility of a therapeutic model of assessment (TMA; Finn, 2007; Finn & Tonsager, 1992, 1997; Fischer, 1994; Hilsenroth & Cromer, 2007) to inform challenging psychotherapies. Given the empirical evidence that TMA aids in the formation of working alliance in early psychotherapy (Ackerman, Hilsenroth, Baity, & Blagys, 2000; Hilsenroth & Cromer, 2007; Hilsenroth, Peters, & Ackerman, 2004), it is expected that a therapeutic assessment intervention will help inform both patients and therapists who are challenged by the work of psychotherapy. This study will rely on a randomized experimental design. Patients seen for psychotherapy in private practice settings, community outpatient clinics, and a college counseling center will be randomly assigned to a TMA condition or a consultation (CON) condition. In both conditions, clinicians will provide a collaborative feedback session with both patient and therapist present. Dependent variables will include assessments of alliance, session evaluation, psychotherapy process, psychological symptoms, feelings of well-being, self-esteem, and therapist activity. It is hypothesized that patients and therapists in both the TMA and CON conditions will find the interventions useful and informative, but that TMA will result in greater improvements in alliance, changes in therapeutic technique, and improvements in patients’ feelings of well-being and self-esteem.