Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention Advance Access originally published online on July 17, 2007
Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention 2007 7(3):184-193; doi:10.1093/brief-treatment/mhm008
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Meeting the Challenges of Evidence-Based Practice: Can Mental Health Therapists Evaluate their Practice?
From the Department of Social Work, California State University (Love, Koob) and School of Social Work, University of Houston (Hill)
Contact author: Susan M. Love, PhD. E-mail: slove{at}csulb.edu
This cross-sectional study looked at the relationship between mental health therapists' perception of treatments' impact and actual change. Twenty-three licensed mental health therapists, providing "treatment-as-usual" to foster children, rated their impact on children's complaints of depression, anxiety, behavior problems, and self-esteem after 6 months of treatment. Actual change was measured by taking the difference from pre- and posttreatment on standardized instruments: Children's Depression Inventory, Beck Anxiety Inventory, Child Behavior Checklist, and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. Of the 23 therapists surveyed, only a single therapist on a single outcome variable negatively evaluated the efficacy of their practice. No correlation was found between the therapists' perceptions of client's progress and actual child's outcomes. Mental health therapists are unable to subjectively evaluate their own practice accurately.
KEY WORDS: child welfare, foster care, evidence-based practice, mental health