Another Perspective on Research as a Measure of High-Quality Practitioner Training: a Response to Dixon, Reed, Smith, Belisle, and Jackson

Abstract

Dixon et al. (Behavior Analysis in Practice 8:7–15, 2015) argued that the research productivity of behavior analytic graduate programs may be a reasonable criterion to evaluate training program quality. They reviewed the cumulative publications of graduate programs. From this analysis, they generated a top ten list of graduate programs with the greatest number of faculty publications and, because of the number of these publications, inferred that they may be better training programs than those not on the list. We countered that the quality of graduate training programs is evident in the behavior of those who are trained, and thus, our field’s interest should focus on determining the degree to which individual program graduates—and not their faculty—have mastered the research process. Thus, we proposed including student authors’ work as an alternative to Dixon et al.’s analysis.