n thinking about treatment and efficacy, does psychotherapy really work? What do

n thinking about treatment and efficacy, does psychotherapy really work?
What do you think, based on reading 33 “Choosing Your Psychologist” from the Koch textbook and the three conclusions of Smith and Glass’s study?
Be sure to summarize the study and conclusions, and decide if you would participate in psychotherapy yourself based on the results.
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info:214 Chapter 9Imagine for a moment that you are experiencing a difficult, emotional time in yourlife. You consult with your usual group of close friends and family members, but youjust cannot seem to work things out. Eventually, when you have endured the pain longenough, you decide to seek some professional help. Because you are an informed, intel-ligent person, you do some reading on psychotherapy and discover that many differ-ent approaches are available. You read about various types of therapy, such as behaviortherapies (including systematic desensitization, discussed in Reading 9.2 on Wolpe’s work),humanistic therapy, cognitive therapies, cognitive behavioral therapy, and various Freudian-based psychodynamic therapies. These assorted styles of psychotherapy, although theystem from different theories and employ different techniques, all share the same basicgoal: to help you change your life in ways that make you a happier, more productive, andmore effective person. (See Wood, 2007, for more about various forms of psychotherapy.)Now you may be totally confused. Which one should you choose if you need help?Here is basically what you need to know: (a) Does psychotherapy really work? (b) If itdoes work, which type works best? It may (or may not) help you to know that over thepast 40 years, psychologists have been asking the same questions. Although researchershave conducted many comparison studies, most of them tend to support the methodused by the psychologists conducting the study—no surprise there. In addition, mostof the studies have been rather small in terms of the number of participants and theresearch techniques used. To make matters worse, the studies are spread over a widerange of books and journals, making a fully informed judgment extremely difficult.To fill this gap in the research literature on psychotherapy techniques, in 1977Mary Lee Smith and Gene Glass at the University of Colorado undertook the task ofcompiling virtually all the studies on psychotherapy effectiveness that had been doneup to that time and reanalyzing them. By searching through 1,000 various magazines,journals, and books, they selected 375 studies that had tested the effects of counselingand psychotherapy. The researchers then applied meta-analysis—a technique developedby Glass—to the data from all the studies in an attempt to determine overall the relativeeffectiveness of different methods. (A meta-analysis takes the results of many individualstudies and integrates them into a larger statistical analysis so that the diverse evidenceis combined into a, presumably, more meaningful whole.)Theoretical PropositionsThe goals of Smith and Glass’s study were the following (p. 752):1. To identify and collect all studies that tested the effects of counseling andpsychotherapy.2. To determine the magnitude of the effect of therapy in each study.3. To compare the outcomes of different types of therapy.The theoretical proposition implicit in these goals was that when this meta-analysiswas complete, psychotherapy would be shown to be (a) effective and (b) differences ineffectiveness of the various methods, if any, could be demonstrated.MethodAlthough the 375 studies analyzed by Smith and Glass varied greatly in terms of theresearch method used and the type of therapy assessed, each study examined at leastone group that received psychotherapy compared with another group that received adifferent form of therapy or no therapy at all (a control group). The magnitude of theeffect of therapy was the most important finding for Smith and Glass to include in theirmeta-analysis. This effect size was obtained for any outcome measure of the therapythat the original researcher chose to use. Often, studies provided more than one mea-surement of effectiveness, or the same measurement may have been taken more than