The discrepancies between APA guidelines for internship accreditation and internship training practices as reported in brochures and The Association of Psychology Internship Centers are analyzed. Those discrepancies reflect a predominant training emphasis on traditional clinical psychology priorities and an overwhelming neglect of sociocultural diversity concerns as spelled out in the APA guidelines. On the basis of these discrepancies, and the developing history of psychology's professional training practices, it is argued that training conceptions and practices which teach and model individual and cultural diversity at each step of our graduate educational process are needed. Increasing the socio-cultural diversity in student groups, role models, teaching perspectives, professional activities, and client populations is necessary just to comply with existing accreditation guidelines. Taking those minimally necessary steps will require taking major steps toward generating needed and long overdue conceptions about training. Those new training conceptions in turn are essential to accomplish the objectives stated in APA's accreditation guidelines.
This study was designed to determine the nature of existing practices and the degree of their correspondence to current training guidelines. The training patterns found provide the basis for the argument that a more radical reconceptualization of internship training-and university graduate training-is essential to prepare students for the career roles that they are expected to fulfill.