Taxonomy of psychotherapy research

Abstract

The study outlines, as the background of the ongoing discussion, the development of psychotherapy research from the classical case history, through the demonstration of its efficacy in legitimacy research, do^n to the differentiation of the outcome conditions in differential psychotherapy efficiency research; it is concerned with a psychotherapy research that can be conducted not under laboratory conditions but under the conditions typical of therapeutic practice. The discussion on the assumptions underlying our notion of man, our concepts of disorders, our therapeutic techniques, and the way we take patient subjectivity into account points toward different approaches on the part of psychotherapy research and practice-oriented research From the standpoint of practice, conventional research tends more to analyze nontypical patients under nontypical therapeutic conditions with an eye to nontypical outcome criteria. Practice-oriented research aims to give more attention to aspects of the subjective, the qualitative, the relationship, and theory-guided concepts of the specific therapeutic approach concerned. The question as to the efficacy of special practice-oriented therapies can be answered better by observation-based studies conducted under naturalistic conditions than by randomized clinical studies that are not appropriate in every case. Examples from the author’s ongoing therapy studies are used to illustrate the approach proposed.

Keywords:
Psychotherapy research, practice-oriented research, randomized studies, qualitative research.