I am planning a study about psychotherapy research in my country. My aim is to describe the themes that have been researched, but also to evaluate the methods, designs, techniques and analysis that researchers have used. It would be helpful if there is an established framework to use in this evaluation.
Otherwise, my plan is to compile a framework based on literature about methods of psychotherapy research. It would also be helpful if you can recommend such literature.
Hope attached ones are of interest to you.
Chapter Chapter 2. Review of standard psychotherapy research methodology
Article Randomized clinical trials in psychotherapy research: Method...
Dear Rubén,
Check these papers out:
Article The Effectiveness of Psychotherapeutic Treatments for Person...
Article Psychotherapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Supervision i...
Article Defensive mechanisms and personality structure in an early a...
The "state of the art" framework would probably be the CONSORT 2010 standards. These cover all sorts of clinical trials. For psychotherapy, add the "Extension" for non-pharmacologic clinical trials. You might also want to include the extension for cluster randomized trials.
Most actual outcome studies won't be able to meet every CONSORT standard, but the ways in which our individual studies fall short should be discussed when reporting our results.
Here is the link to the CONSORT home page. All the checklists and at least some of the related position papers should be available here.
http://www.consort-statement.org/
Common sense in designing and viewing research in the context of the real world is not always captured in some of the technical specifications. One of these is sample size. In doing outcome evaluations, we have found that stable numbers are not achieved with samples much under 200. However, you will find many studies with much smaller numbers. The problem with that is that a few outliers can skew findings. For example in a study with 50 people in each of two cells, as few as three individuals can make a difference of 6% in positive vs. negative outcomes in a cell. On the other hand, studies with very large numbers can achieve statistical significance that is essentially meaningless. For example, I recently read a study with thousands of subjects. The reported differences were statistically significant beyond p = .001, but the absolute differences were just a fraction of a percent in outcome - identical for all practical purposes.
Another area is the assumption that randomization achieves equality. I once assisted a physician with a study in which the baseline differences on key variables were significantly different beyond p = .05 at baseline even though randomization was rigorously done. That level of difference would be expected on average for one out of every 20 similar studies.
Consideration of sample size, verifying equality of cells at baseline, objective measures to the extent possible, and accounting for potential influencing factors are essential for rigor.
Hi Ruben.
You've already received some excellent suggestions. Just to add to those, you'd find this book quite useful:
Wampold, B. E. & Imel, Z. E. (2015). The great psychotherapy debate: The Evidence for What Makes Psychotherapy Work, 2nd Edition. New York: Routledge.
And this paper covers different approaches to studying psychotherapy and contains many useful references:
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