4. Research in psychotherapy Flashcards
Qualitative designs:
general..
Progress rather than outcome,
fieldwork and occurs in natural setting,
enable individual to be studied in depth,
avoid simplifications imposed by quantification,
Qualitative designs:
Thematic analysis
careful line-by-line reading of interview transcripts to identify themes within informant’s accounts of the topic under study
Qualitative designs:
Grounded theory
identify a single overarching category that encapsulated the core meaning of the phenomenon being studied
Qualitative designs:
Imperative phenomenological analysis
attend to structural and linguistic aspects of informant accounts (eg. impact of silence in therapy)
Qualitative designs:
Consensual qualitative research
list of categories derived from previous research, theory, or clinical experience, and requires the analysis to be conducted by a team of researchers
Qualitative designs:
Meta-synthesis
systematic review and integration of findings from qualitative studies
Quantitative designs:
General.. Case studies
allow for examination of the detailed unfolding of events across time in the context of the case as a whole.
Generality adressed through replication of case-by-case basis.
Research questions:
- Outcome questions
- Theory-building questions
- Pragmatic questions
- Experiential or narrative questions
Quantitative designs:
Types of case studies
Clinical case studies
Narrative account of the therapy written by the therapist
Quantitative designs:
Types of case studies
Experimental case studies/ Single-case experimental designs
often known as N=1
testing hypotheses about treatment effects
measure a specific behaviour, apply intervention, measure behaviour after
Quantitative designs:
Types of case studies
Naturalistic/Systematic studies
rectify methodological problems associated with clinical case studies
Quantitative designs:
Strengths and weaknesses of case studies
Strengths:
measure what actually happens in therapy
Weaknesses:
cannot make meaningful generalizations
issues in case selection
issues in objectivity of reporting
Quantitative designs:
Randomized controlled trials (RCT)
explicitly ask questions about the comparative benefits of two or more treatments
- treatments can be compared or contrasted with no treatment (placebo) or treatment with known efficacy
- need that results are replicable, sessions are monitored to ensure treatment integrity
Treatment measures (not only one):
- reliable change index (participants moving from dysfunctional to normative)
- clinical significance (meaningfulness of magnitude of change)
- effect size (small, 0.25, medium, 0.5, large 1.0)
Quantitative designs:
Randomized controlled trials (RCT)
Strengths and weaknesses
Strengths:
- best form for causal relationships
- best design to control biases
- allows measure of multiple results
Weaknesses:
- high cost
- ethical difficulties (waiting list)
Quantitative designs:
Systematic review
Summarizes the result of available, carefully designed healthcare studies (controlled trials).
The maximum number of available studies that treat to answer to a same question of investigation.
Systematic and explicit methods to minimise biases
(5 steps)
Quantitative designs:
Meta-analysis
systematically combining the results of previous research to draw conclusions about the body of research.
Effect size makes the meta-analysis possible:
- it is the dependant variable
- standardizes findings accross studies so that they can be directly compared
