Louis G. Castonguay

Conducted within a practice-research network in private practice, this exploratory study was aimed at examining whether clinicians can accurately predict and recall profiles of therapeutic interventions they used during an entire treatment for a given client. Based on a small sample (7 clinicians and 30 clients), the results tentatively suggest that the predictions that therapists made after session 3 regarding which types of techniques they would use, as well as the retrospective assessment of typical techniques they reported using in therapy, were accurate and generally discriminative. Clinical implications in line with deliberate practice are suggested and future research on complex questions related to clinical prediction is proposed.

Integration has become an important and influential movement within psychotherapy practice, reflected by the fact that many treatment providers now identify as integrative. However, integration has not had as great an influence on psychotherapy research. The goal of this paper is to highlight the growing body of research on psychotherapy integration, and to identify future directions for research that may strengthen the integration movement as well as the field of psychotherapy as a whole. We first summarize the past 25 years of research on integration, with a focus on four approaches to integration: theoretical integration, technical eclectic, common factors, and assimilative integration. Next, we identify directions of research within these four areas that could strengthen and support integrative practice. We then propose ways in which the perspective of integrationists could contribute to psychotherapy research in the critical areas of harmful effects, therapist effects, practice-oriented research, and training. We end this paper by suggesting that a greater collaboration between integrationists and psychotherapy researchers will help to create a unified landscape of knowledge and action that will benefit all participants and advance the field.

In this concluding paper, we identify the type of studies conducted by 11 teams of contributors to a special issue on building clinicians-researchers partnerships. Those studies were conducted across a variety of clinical settings. We also integrate the lessons that have emerged from their collaborative initiatives in terms of obstacles faced, strategies adopted to address these challenges, benefits gained, and general recommendations offered to facilitate studies conducted with or by clinicians. The paper ends with the authors' thoughts about the future success of practice-oriented research in general.

This paper is an introduction to a special series that attempts to foster collaboration between clinicians and researchers by presenting the experiences of 11 groups of contributors who have conducted practice-oriented research (POR) in various countries and naturalistic settings. Each of these groups was asked to describe the context in which their collaborative initiatives took place, as well as some of the studies conducted, obstacles faced, strategies employed to address these challenges, and benefits earned. Authors were also invited to provide general recommendations to facilitate future POR. In order to integrate the lessons learned so far, as well as to consolidate suggestions for future collaboration of clinicians, researchers, and other stakeholders in the field of mental health, the series ends with a conclusion paper that identifies convergences and particular characteristics that cut across the partnerships featured.

Learning how to conduct clinically meaningful and actionable research while simultaneously training to be a competent clinician may be an optimal way to develop an early attachment to the scientific-practitioner model. In this paper, the transformation of a training clinic into a practice research network (PRN) is presented as a strategy to foster a seamless integration of clinical, training, and research facets of graduate training in psychology. With the hope of providing helpful guidance to trainers and trainees interested in building such an infrastructure, the authors describe the context in which they developed their training clinic PRN, its major components, and some of the studies that have been conducted in this network. Benefits earned and lessons learned (in terms of obstacles faced and strategies implemented to deal with them) are described, as well as general recommendations and future directions regarding the implementation and impact of training clinic PRNs.

Responding to an invitation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the journal Psychotherapy, the goal of this article is to describe three general ways by which the impact of psychotherapy might be improved: (a) clinically, by encouraging the assimilation of empirically based principles of change and psychopathology research into day-to-day practice; (b) empirically, by fostering process and outcome research focused on a wide range of common factors and basic findings; as well as (c) clinically and empirically, by facilitating active collaboration of practitioners and researchers in various types of practice-oriented research. Reflected in these three potential avenues of growth are the assumptions that (a) we can improve our understanding and impact of psychotherapy by building on convergences and complementarities across different theoretical orientations, domains of research, and professional expertise, and that (b) most of the clinical and research suggestions derived by such convergence and plurality may not require drastic changes in the practice of many psychotherapists.

This article presents a model of a practice-research network that offers benefits for clinicians working at college and university counseling centers. We briefly describe the basic components of this practice-research network, challenges in developing it, and some of the empirical studies that have resulted from this initiative. We also describe possibilities for future research that not only will foster further collaborations between clinicians and researchers, but also will enhance our ability to understand and improve mental health services for college students.

This paper describes three pathways of connections between different communities of knowledge seekers: integration of psychotherapeutic approaches, integration of psychotherapy and psychopathology, and integration of science and practice. Some of the issues discussed involve the delineation and investigation of common factors (e.g., principles of change), improvement of major forms of psychotherapy, clinical implications of psychopathology research, as well as current and future directions related to practice-research networks. The aim of this paper is to suggest that building bridges across theoretical orientations, scientific fields, professional experiences, and epistemological views may be a fruitful strategy to improve our understanding and the impact of psychotherapy.

The goal of this article is to delineate training implications regarding harmful effects associated with psychotherapy. The authors strongly recommend that trainees be made aware of (and encouraged to examine carefully) the potentially harmful treatments that have been recently identified (Lilienfeld, 2007). Consistent with a broad perspective on evidence-based practice, it is also argued that additional guidelines for the prevention and repair of harmful impacts can be derived from psychotherapy research on process (technique and relationship) and participant (client and therapist) variables. For example, rigid adherence to the application of psychotherapy techniques can be a potentially harmful therapist behavior that necessitates careful training on the nature and flexible use of interventions. Furthermore, the authors suggest that trainers and supervisors tentatively consider training implications linked to clinical observations and theoretical assertions, such as the premature use of clinical interpretations, with the assumption that more confidence in such therapeutic guidelines can be gained when they are supported by multiple knowledge sources (empirical, clinical, conceptual). Finally, training implications related to the monitoring of harmful effects in terms of treatment outcome and process are demarcated.

The authors present the structure and process of a task force aimed at delineating empirically based principles of change in psychotherapy. Sponsored by Division 12 of the American Psychological Association and the North American Society for Psychotherapy Research, the task force addressed the potential role of participant characteristics, relationship variables, and technical factors in the treatment of dysphoric, anxiety, personality, and substance use disorders. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol 62: 631–638, 2006.