ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the practical and methodological difficulties related to residential treatment outcome research, both in terms of earlier criticisms of outcome research and of more recent commentaries noting the increased importance of funding issues and fiscal accountability. It discusses some of the practical and methodological difficulties related to residential treatment outcome research. In addition to the variety of problems facing residential treatment research already described, more published discussions have noted a number of other practical and methodological obstacles. More commentaries on the status of residential treatment follow-up evaluation have discussed issues such as the goals of outcome assessment, problems facing implementation of evaluation research programs and relative importance of statistically-oriented evaluation research as compared to more qualitative, hypothesis-generating studies. A residential treatment outcome study used the Rorschach to evaluate adolescent personality functioning at admission and after two years of treatment, concluding that the research results indicated the utility of the Rorschach test-retest method of assessing treatment outcome.
