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Syzygy, science, and psychotherapy: The Consumer Reports study
Author(s) -
Howard Kenneth I.,
Krause Merton S.,
Caburnay Charlene A.,
Noel Susan B.,
Saunders Stephen M.
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
journal of clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.124
H-Index - 119
eISSN - 1097-4679
pISSN - 0021-9762
DOI - 10.1002/jclp.1055
Subject(s) - psychology , psychotherapist , hilbert's syzygy theorem , interpretation (philosophy) , sample (material) , clinical psychology , outcome (game theory) , philosophy , chemistry , mathematics , discrete mathematics , chromatography , linguistics , mathematical economics
Results from a Consumer Reports (CR) survey indicated that psychotherapy has proven to be quite effective and that longer‐term therapy has been more effective than shorter‐term therapy. Critiques of the methodology of this study have included the claim that (a) the self‐selected sample was biased in favor of people who felt that they had benefited from psychotherapy, (b) the use of retrospective accounts led to a further positive bias, and (c) the validity of the outcome assessment was questionable. Supplemental data from other sources, including prospective data from a large sample of psychotherapy patients, are presented to augment the interpretation of the results of the CR study and to illustrate how some critiques of research results can be evaluated systematically. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Clin Psychol 57: 865–874, 2001.