Volume 22, Issue 3
FROM CLINICIAN TO RESEARCHER: APPLICATIONS OF SINGLE CASE EXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS AT CLINICAL CONTEXT
Abstract
During the last decades, the demands of scientific evidence for the effectiveness of the many forms of psychotherapy have been increasing. The great majority of controlled studies have been conducted under the design of random clinical trials, which requires a big number of subjects, and a great deal of material resources. They are usually inaccessible for the average psychotherapist. Single Case Experimental Designs (SCED) are a set of designs specifically developed to be applied in a clinical setting. The aim of SCED is to assess the effect of an intervention on a patient, and it´s a way of gathering the scientific activity with the clinical practice. It allows the integration of formal research methods with the daily clinical practice. The psychotherapists education and training in these kind of designs would allow the production of a big deal of rigorous knowledge about the processes developed in the real life clinical settings.
Keywords
Psychotherapy research – psychotherapy effectiveness – Evidence Based Psychotherapy - Single Case Experimental Designs