Dear Sinead,

I wonder if you are looking for different psychotherapeutic interventions to treat behavioral problems. E.g. Desensitization therapy routinely used to treat clients of specific Phobia. Or are you pointing towards Therapies like CBT or DBT ?

If yes, there are ample of publications.

Forgive me I am incorrect.

Waiting for your reply please.

a study I wish to conduct in the future is to have a pretest and post test of clinical measures on students before such and such mental issues and after a year of intervention

Hi Sinead,

I know of some trials where people are asked to complete a 'behaviour test' before and after therapy - e.g. giving a short presentation in social anxiety, or seeing how close they can get to a feared object in specific phobia. Is that the sort of thing? I'm not sure exactly what gets measured (I think subjective units of distress is usually one of them), though this should be reported in the papers somewhere I guess.

that is one means of doing the behavior test Dr. Thew. I was thinking on the line of conducting the Rorschach Inkblot, Thematic Apperception and Bender Gestalt (projectives) individual assessments after a year of intervention.

In studies on metacognitive training (MCT) for schizophrenia there are various "behavioural" measures of effectiveness used.

In paper on MCT specificity we used such measures - Fish Task and Reading the Mind in the Eyes test:

Article Do specific metacognitive training modules lead to specific ...

And we also done a systematic review on MCT where we analysed such results:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9077/0e298a859d6979c07a04e9cbd468ee066918.pdf

Best

Firstly, I speak as a student.

My reply to your inquiry, would be that I believe there is likely to be a wealth of research in these areas. Indeed simply looking through the various anthologies, for example The Sage Handbook of Counseling and Psychotherapy (I happen to have on a shelf next to me) and many other similar publications, will show up much of the current research.

One can simply search Google (retch) to bring up multiple results. But I might admit to over-simplicity, since I am a mere (although very old) novice..

I am developing a study to evaluate the self-reported effect of a phsychosocial behavior group intervention for pvulnerable eople living with HIV in Belgium Flanders. If interested we can exchange on this

Hi Sinead. Fascinating study area and some useful responses. Not my area of specialism, but I wonder if following through on some of the relevant thinking which led to production of some of the standard therapy effectiveness assessments, such as CORE, also the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 routinely used it NHS therapy provision might be helpful. This might be a way of getting to the evidence base (if it exists) which underpins the inclusion of the self report questions these assessments ask, which relate directly with your subject interests. Best wishes. Bill

Thank you everyone for your thoughtful responses. I was thinking about CBT based approaches. I'm interested in the reliability and sensitivity of using a behaviour task as an outcome measure pre / post an intervention compared to self report measure. I think it is easier to do well with phobias than other difficulties that may vary across contexts e.g. social anxiety or paranoia. I know papers have used behavioural tasks as outcome measures previously but looking for a review of the validity/reliability of such...if it exists =)

There is more than 50 years of research on the effectiveness of therapy, independent of specific techniques, including recently published articles and at least one book. Try bruce Walpole (spelling?) as an author

As per the clinical literature, several meta-analyses re: psychotherapy outcomes, about 75 to 80% of clients Show + impact. Many BHC clinicians use an integrative approach. CBT itself is known to be efficacious. These MA's looked at many approaches across multiple presenting issues.

Rich

Data collection and reporting on such outcomes may be challenging to find outside the treatment centres but I may suggest interviews with practitioners to establish the facts or information you are seeking