ABSTRACT
In contemporary psychotherapy practice and research, the words evidence and effectiveness have both methodological and political issues (Sackett, Rosenberg, Gray, Haynes, & Richardson, 1996). From a methodological perspective, evidence can be the foundational information on which therapists base their beliefs in the usefulness, efficacy, and effectiveness of an intervention with individuals, couples, families, or groups. In this vein, evidence can also be seen by some therapists to offer support or to establish confidence in the potential effectiveness of a clinical approach with a particular clinical problem. Methodologically, this evidence of effectiveness can be derived from a variety of sense-making activities on the part of an observer or participant or yielded from a number of investigative designs ranging from the reflections of therapists on their clinical cases to highly controlled experiments wherein researchers conduct statistical analyses of effect size differences between the measured outcomes of participants who are randomly assigned to different treatments delivered by therapists operating from procedural manuals (Chenail, DeVincentis, Kiviat, & Somers, 2012).
