The professional code of the Italian Psychologists:

an Empirical Research.

Ilaria Cutica
Psicologa, Dottoranda in Scienze Cognitive presso Università di Torino, Dipartimento di Psicologia
Barbara Palmieri
Psicologa, Milano
Marco Zuffranieri
Psicologo, borsista di metodologia, Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università di Torino

The present study concerns the Italian psychologists’ Professional Code; the aim of the work was to find an answer to the following questions:

We tested psychology students to understand whether or not common sense could be enough to overcome difficulties psychologists meet within their professional practice. Psychology students, in fact, know enough of the psychology to understand the problems we were talking about, but at the same time they don’t know much about the professional practice, so that they have to use their common sense to solve the situations we presented them with.

Research’s design

The research has been conducted on a quota sample of 308 psychology students at the University of Turin, enrolled from the first up to the fifth year.

The questions were grouped as follows:

1) Demographic questions, to obtain subjects’ personal data.

2) Core questions: behaviour in professional situation. The subjects were asked what their behaviour would be in different hypothetical situations a psychologist could go through: they read a brief description of a problematic situation, and they had to choose their answer among four possibilities. There were 15 questions.

3) Questions about the awareness of the Professional Code. We were interested in whether or not students were acquainted with the existence of the Professional Code, and about the source of their knowledge.

Findings:

The main results are:

• More than 50% of the sample correctly answered  at least 11 questions out of 15.
• The mean of correct answers was 9.68 (st. dev.: 2.06).
• 35.5% of the sample knew about the existence of the Professional Code (80.7% of these learnt of it attending a university course).
• 6 questions out of 15 much more difficult (52% only correct answers) than the others. The two main topics of these 6 questions were the contemporary interactions with different professional figures, and forensic matters.

Results suggest first that the Professional Code norms go further a mere transcription of the common sense and ethical norms every psychologist possess on his matter: in complex situations it is essential to know unequivocal written principles.

Second, we found a specific difficulty in dealing with forensic matters. That’s why, being aware of all the problems arising in forensic psychology, and as the Professional Code doesn’t have a specific section dedicated to it, the Italian Association for Forensic Psychology formulated "Guidelines for Italian Forensic Psychologists".