Professional Regulations and Ethical Standards
Many countries around the world have professional regulations for the practice of psychology. “With some exceptions, the existence of professional regulation reflects the level of development of professional psychology in that country. A profession needs to establish an identity and credibility before there is something to be regulated” (Pettifor, 2007, p. 312). In the 35 European countries represented in EFPA, a major effort is underway to unify the basic academic curriculum as well as other requirements underlying the training of psychologists. These countries are now in the process of establishing a European Diploma in Psychology comparable to a Master’s level university education of six years duration that includes supervised practice.
Some countries that currently have no regulation of the profession include: India, Iran, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Thailand and Turkey. Several of these countries are working toward licensing legislation, and several have developed ethical standards of practice to guide. At present a considerable number of national psychology associations have adopted a code of ethics such as, for instance, APA’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. EFPA has adopted several codes of ethics in recent years, and the five Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) adopted a unified code of ethics in 1988, which they revised in 1998 to be more consistent with EFPA’s meta-code (Pettifor, 2007). Moreover, IUPsyS and IAAP, adopted, in 2008, developed a Universal Declaration of Ethical Principles of Psychologists.
Read more about this topic: International Psychology
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