High Quality Psychotherapy Research: From Conception to Piloting to National Trials

Although psychotherapy research shares many of the same methodological issues that pharmacology trials do, psychotherapy research poses unique challenges, including the difficulty (if not near impossibility) of keeping participants blind to treatment assignment, the need for a replicable manual and therapist training procedure, the importance of outside observation of therapy quality ratings, and the problems researchers face in measuring the active ingredients of psychotherapy.

High Quality Psychotherapy Research is for all psychotherapy investigators who wish to learn state-of-the-art psychotherapy research methods. Organized developmentally, the book explains the conceptualization of the trial, discusses the pilot study and the large scale study, and concludes with instructions for designing a multi-site trial. Topics specific to psychotherapy research are examined in detail, including innovations in data analysis, how to conduct multi-site psychotherapy trials, mediation of treatment outcomes, the transportability of evidence-based behavioral interventions in community practice, training community providers to be study therapists, and recruiting hard-to-reach populations.

High Quality Psychotherapy Research is an informative, practical book appropriate for a broad range of readers, from junior investigators developing their first study idea to seasoned investigators who wish to take their research to a larger-scale level.