ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the patient-focused psychotherapy research approach, which is concerned with the monitoring, prediction, and evaluation of individual treatment progress during the course of psychotherapy or counseling by means of the repeated assessment of outcome variables. Psychotherapies are viewed as a class of treatments defined by overlapping techniques, mechanisms, and proposed outcomes. The latter are measured by summing items related to many disorders. For the minimally impaired patients, any amount of positive change on the instrument resulted in a positive evaluation of treatment progress. Instead of identifying particular treatments for particular diagnoses as in clinical trials, patient-focused research deals with the improvement of the actual treatment as implemented, and the development of tools to achieve that task. Finally, feedback could be supplemented with additional information about each of the measures comprising the global feedback.
