The Relation of Clinical Research to Practice and the Apparent Crisis of Confidence

ABSTRACT Barlow (1981) lists nine reasons why clinical psychologists do not undertake research and why traditional research does not influence clinicians. These reasons focus on: (1) lack of access to a large subject pool; (2) manpower costs of conducting research; (3) financial costs of conducting research; (4) ethics; (5) research's overreliance on statistical significance; (6) difficulty in predicting a treatment's effectiveness with an individual from nomothetic research; (7) the practitioner's awareness that each client is different; (8) the practitioner's resistance to using factorial designs; and (9) the view that research may thwart clinician's effort to get clients better as quickly as possible. Intensive local observation, a series of single case studies using each patient seen by a therapist as a self-containeo. experiment, may be one solution to closing the researcher-practitioner gap. A more basic underlying reason that clinicians do not engage in research, are not trusted by the public, and are ineffective is that graduate schools are training the wrong people to be clinical psychologists. Too much emphasis is placed on psychometric and standardized intelligence tests. Students in experimental psychology perform well because experimentation and statistics can be taught and learned. Psychotherapy is more difficult to teach and learn. If clinical psychology is to improve its effectiveness, it must put less emphasis on abilities like memorization and social conformity and must attract students who are emotionally mature, have lived less sheltered lives, and have some knowledge of the world. (NB)