Research methods in clinical psychology:
An introduction for students and practitioners
Chris Barker, Nancy Pistrang, and Robert Elliott
CHAPTER 2
Perspectives on research
Background issues
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Philosophical
Professional
Political
Personal
What is research?
Form ideas
Compare
with
original
ideas
Gather
information
Interpret results
Problems in the research cycle
• Data gathering
– “Ivory tower” isolation
– over-confidence
• Interpretation
– Biases
• Reformulation
– Dogmatism, rigidity
Pure and applied research
Pure (or basic) research addresses the
generation and testing of theory.
Applied research addresses practical questions
-- also known as evaluation/ audit/ quality
assurance/ health services research.
Dictionary definition (OED)
“A search or investigation directed to the discovery
of some fact by careful consideration or study of a
subject; a course of critical or scientific enquiry.”
Implications:
Careful, methodical study
Detached, critical, scholarly attitude
No prescribed method
Discovery versus confirmation
Facts and reality
What is science?
• Induction
• Falsification (Popper)
• Kuhn’s historical viewpoint
Induction
Observations
theories
e.g., Freud’s case studies
Problems:
– Logical basis
– Theory-dependence of observation
Deduction
Theory
inference
test
“Hypothetico-deductive method”
Popper
• good theories make falsifiable predictions
• “conjectures and refutations”
– e.g., in neuropsychology
Problem:
status of potentially disconfirmatory
evidence
Kuhn’s views
Paradigm: accepted theory and methods
“Normal science”
Scientific revolution: replacement of current
paradigm by another
Problems:
Incommensurability of paradigms
No criteria for progress
Intuitive practitioner model
Conduct clinical work on basis of personal
intuition and of knowledge from sources
other than research.
Scientist-practitioner model
Articulated in the USA in the 1940s -- also
known as the Boulder model (APA, 1947;
Raimy, 1950).
Clinical psychologists are trained to be
clinicians as well as researchers (a twin
track approach).
Applied-scientist model
(Shapiro, 1967, 1985)
Clinical work as a scientific endeavour:
– Apply the findings of general psychology
– Only use empirically validated assessment
methods
– Form hypotheses about the nature and
determinants of the client's problems and
collect data to test these hypotheses.
Research and practice are integrated, not
dichotomized.
Evidence-based practitioner model
Use best current empirical evidence
(especially RCTs) to select optimum
interventions and assessment methods.
(Sackett et al., 1997)
Some underlying dichotomies
• Producing versus consuming research
• Pure versus applied research
• Small-N versus large-N research