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How the field understands psychotherapy expertise is important. It affects how we practice and how we prepare others for practice. As in our other work, we argue that the most meaningful definition of expertise must involve steady improvement over time to achieve superior performance on some meaningful measure, which typically is client outcome. We also argue that the best means by which a therapist can achieve this is through ongoing deliberate practice. We contrast our position with not only Hill, Spiegel, Hoffman, Kivlighan, and Gelso’s preferred definition, in which they anchor expertise in therapist performance, but also with the various other possible definitions of expertise (e.g., therapist experience, therapist self-assessment of expertise) that they proffer as options.

This study examines belongingness as a strengths-based protective factor. Belongingness is investigated in relationship to the threat of low peer acceptance for loneliness and of high loneliness for depression in adolescents. Data were collected from peers for adolescents’ peer acceptance and from adolescents themselves for other variables. Ratings of peers and self-reported survey data were analyzed together from data collected from 294 eighth-grade students from a culturally and ethnically diverse school. Results indicated belongingness was a significant moderator of the influence of peer acceptance on loneliness and of loneliness on depression. This suggests that belongingness is a potentially important buffer against the negative effects of low peer acceptance and high loneliness. Implications for counseling psychologists working with ethnically diverse adolescents are discussed.

Steven D Hollon, PhD1; Bruce E Wampold, PhD, ABPP2 Can J Psychiatry. 2009;54(9):637-643. Randomized Controlled Trials Are Relevant to Clinical Practice I think that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are highly relevant to clinical practice. If I had a serious medical illness, I would want to know that what I was about to receive actually worked and how it fared relative to other treatment options. Saying that something works means that it has a causal effect (relative to its absence), and saying that it works better than other options means that its impact is even larger than those other options. The most powerful method yet devised to determine whether something has a causal effect (or how it compares with other options) is to test it in an RCT. I think that people with psychological disorders deserve the same level of certainty as people with medical disorders; I want to know whether what I do works. I do not defend RCTs because I conduct them, I conduct RCTs because I can defend them. All causal inference starts with observation. If I want to know if a treatment works, I want to know what happens to people who get treated. If I had a serious medical illness, the first thing I would do is talk to other people who had the disorder and find out what they did and how it went. The problem with relying on such anecdotal observations is that I could never know whether what happened was a consequence of treatment. I would be glad if all the outcomes were benign, but that would not tell me that treatment was necessary to produce those happy outcomes. When my son was growing up he played soccer with teammates who were spanked by their parents when they misbehaved. When those parents observed that we did not spank our son, they were curious as to how we expected him to learn right from wrong. Their parents had spanked them when they were young and they had turned out well. Therefore, they believed it was their obligation as caring and responsible parents to spank their children if they wanted them to turn out well. The fact that something happens does not mean that is was caused by what you did. I may decide to talk to people who had been treated and others who had not (if any were still living) and see how each turned out. This is a quasi-experiment in which people are exposed to different treatments and their subsequent outcomes are observed. The problem with this strategy is that it confounds individual differences with differential treatment. Considered medical opinion for the last several decades has been that women going through menopause benefited from hormone replacement therapy. Women who were treated with estrogen did appear to do better than women who were not. The problem with this inference was that women were free to choose whether they received estrogen or not and those who choose estrogen typically took better care of themselves and had better access to health care. When the field finally got around to doing an RCT on adding estrogen, the study was stopped before completion because replacement therapy increased the risk for cancer and heart disease.1 It is not that the doctors providing hormone replacement therapy did not care about their patients or that the women treated with it did not care about their health. We simply did not have the right kind of data to draw an accurate causal inference, and a generation of women suffered as a consequence. Randomization is designed to control for individual differences. If people sort themselves into conditions for reasons related to the differences between them then any subsequent outcomes observed could be as much a consequence of preexistent individual differences as a consequence of treatment. Good intentions are not enough to do right by patients; hard data are needed that speak to the causal potency of a treatment. RCTs remain the single best (but not the only) way to collect such data. RCTs control for spontaneous remission and other factors related to the passage of time, and they control for individual differences that can affect subsequent course. …

In her advocacy of a model to train counseling psychologists as “evidence-based practitioners,” Chwalisz (2003 [this issue]) criticizes research based on positivism and advocates for methodological pluralism but ironically suggests the adoption of a medical model to influence the discourse on practice. In this comment, the author examines (a) issues raised by methodological pluralism and multiple sources of evidence and (b) dilemmas created by criticizing quantitative methods while at the same time adopting a medical model. Finally, the author suggests that methodological inclusiveness does not logically imply, and should not lead to, rejection of quantitative methods in counseling psychology.

The authors present background on the development of principles for the identification of empirically supported interventions in counseling psychology by the American Psychological Association’s Division 17 and include an overview of guiding considerations around which these principles were developed. As a context for these principles, the authors present a brief history of the social-economic-professional context within which the sometimes contentious movement toward the recognition of empirically supported treatments has developed within professional psychology. Seven principles for the consideration of the empirical support of counseling psychology interventions are presented along with discussion of the rationale behind each principle.

There is a strong movement toward employing only evidence-based treatments or empirically validated treatments (EVTs) in delivering psychological services. This movement is affecting professional practice, research, and training now and will continue to be influential far into the future. Efficacious treatments attempt to respond successfully to three prominent realms challenging psychology’s professional integrity: practicing psychologists’ applications, scientific certainty, and marketplace demands. In addition, training efficacy and adherence to ethical principles must be considered regarding adopting EVTs. Although the successful blending of these domains holds forth great potential for enriching training and practice, consolidating these areas may obscure elements essential to each pursuit. This article reviews both the merits and concerns the EVT movement holds forth for the counseling psychology profession. Recommendations are offered for integrating EVT knowledge into coursework and practica training.

This study used the same paired comparison format used in four earlier studies to survey ethnic minority preferences for counselor characteristics. However, in the current study, a statistical procedure designed specifically for paired comparison data that provides a powerful test of the relationship between preferences for counselor characteristics and selected within-group variables was used to analyze Asian American preferences for counselor characteristics. Similar attitudes and values was found to be the most preferred counselor characteristic for both personal and career problems. Also, preferences for counselor characteristics were found to be related to type of problem (personal or career), participant level of acculturation, and participant sex. Implications for future practice and research are discussed

Science and practice cannot continue together without a major attitudinal shiA a broadening perspective of science and practice and how these two activities can be integrated to strengthen each other. This article represents the culmination of a 2-year project that examined the roles of science and practice within counseling psychology. The central goal of the article is to present (a) specific recommendations for promoting the integration of science and practice within Division 17 and (b) suggest specific strategies for implementing the recommendations.

The purpose of this article is to propose competencies that are necessary to conduct research in counseling psychology and to propose curricular modifications that will aid the acquisition of those competencies. To understand better the present status of research training in counseling psychology, programs approved by the American Psychological Association were surveyed to assess the research design and analysis curriculum of those programs, research articles in the Journal of Counseling Psychology were examined to determine the types of analyses commonly used, and the literature discussing research training in counseling psychology was reviewed. Generally, it was found that many students are not well trained in procedures that are commonly used in counseling psychology research and that the present level of training attenuates the quality of research in counseling psychology. To obtain the research competencies necessary to conduct quality research, a curriculum containing didactic and experiential components is recommended.

This report presents a summary of the conclusions and recommendations of the Research Group at the Third National Conference for Counseling Psychology. The report is organized into five topics, as were discussed during the conference. These topics are (a) definition and image, (b) methodological diversity in counseling research, (c) multi- and cross-cultural issues, (d) the connection of research to practice, and (e) research training. Fifteen general recommendations are offered to the specialty regarding research in counseling psychology.