ABSTRACT
Family-oriented interventions have come to be increasingly recognized as an effective approach for the treatment of biopsychosocial disorders (Lebow and Gurman, 1995; Pinsof and Wynne, 1995). This fact must not, however, be overestimated because of a number of methodological and conceptual issues have not been solved satisfactorily. Although family therapists claim to have introduced a new paradigm into mental health and health care, the status of research in this area is marginal because of many unresolved problems. For instance, therapists often still fail to achieve sufficient integration of empirically based research findings into their daily work, and the effectiveness of their interventions is often not evaluated systematically (Liddle, 1991; L' Abate, 1994). If therapists, on the one hand, could be encouraged to take more account of the complex findings of research and to formulate questions that are of special interest to their line of work, significant progress could be made in clinical practice as we know it. Researchers, on the other hand, must put more effort into studying therapies from a practical perspective and into clearly formulating the relevance of their findings to clinical work. In other words, increased co-operation between research and practice is a fundamental prerequisite for professional standards of clinical quality management (Pinsof and Wynne, 2000). In addition, the family therapeutic approach must be linked to and supported by other human and social sciences. It can be assumed that the movement of family therapy will only become widely accepted and academically integrated when it concerns itself with the knowledge and research standards established in related disciplines in the field of mental health (Shields and Wynne, 1994).
