The public is bombarded daily with reports about risk factors, many conflicting with each other, others accepted as "scientific truth" for awhile, then scientifically disproved, yet others questionable that later prove to be true. Physicians are faced with trying to make sense of those conflicting or questionable results in the scientific literature in order to guide their patients to the best possible decisions. The situation is not much easier for scientists who may waste years of their productive life, and considerable resources, basing their research efforts on what prove to be misleading...

In this book, Kraemer presents a systematic, objective methodology by which to determine the effectiveness of medical tests. She shows clearly and concisely how to define statistical terms and approaches consistently from study to study, how to stipulate statistical assumptions underlying various approaches, how to check for empirical validity and how to judge the robustness of statistical outcomes, resulting in models that integrate many different approaches and extend the strengths of each.

Although psychotherapy research shares many of the same methodological issues that pharmacology trials do, psychotherapy research poses unique challenges, including the difficulty (if not near impossibility) of keeping participants blind to treatment assignment, the need for a replicable manual and therapist training procedure, the importance of outside observation of therapy quality ratings, and the problems researchers face in measuring the active ingredients of psychotherapy.
High-Quality Psychotherapy Research is for all psychotherapy investigators who wish to learn...