Research Methods in Clinical Psychology E-Book

Chris Barker

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 687

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Fully updated to reflect the latest developments, the third edition of Research Methods In Clinical Psychology offers a comprehensive introduction to the various methods, approaches, and strategies for conducting research in the clinical psychology field.

• Represents the most accessible, user-friendly introduction to conducting and evaluating research for clinical psychologists and related professionals
• Ideal for students and practitioners who wish to conduct their own research or gain a better understanding of published research
• Addresses important issues such as philosophical underpinnings of various methodologies, along with socio-political issues that arise in clinical and community settings

• Step-by-step guidance through all phases of a clinical psychology research project—from initial concept and groundwork, through to measurement, design, analysis, and interpretation
• Updates to this edition include new or expanded coverage of such topics as  systematic review and literature searching methods, modern psychometric methods, guidance on choosing between different qualitative approaches, and conducting psychological research via the Internet

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Preface to the Third Edition

About the Companion Website

1 Introduction: The Research Process

2 Perspectives on Research

PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES

PROFESSIONAL ISSUES

PERSONAL ISSUES

CHAPTER SUMMARY

FURTHER READING

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

3 Doing the Groundwork

FORMULATING THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS

THE POLITICS OF RESEARCH IN APPLIED SETTINGS

CHAPTER SUMMARY

FURTHER READING

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

4 Foundations of Quantitative Measurement

THE PROCESS OF MEASUREMENT

FOUNDATIONS OF QUANTITATIVE METHODS

PSYCHOMETRIC THEORY

CHAPTER SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

FURTHER READING

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

5 Foundations of Qualitative Methods

PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND

FAMILIES OF QUALITATIVE APPROACHES

WAYS OF EVALUATING QUALITATIVE STUDIES

CONCLUSION: CHOOSING AND COMBINING METHODS

CHAPTER SUMMARY

FURTHER READING

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

6 Self-Report Methods

QUALITATIVE SELF-REPORT METHODS

QUANTITATIVE SELF-REPORT METHODS

CHAPTER SUMMARY

FURTHER READING

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

7 Observation

QUALITATIVE OBSERVATION

QUANTITATIVE OBSERVATION

CHAPTER SUMMARY

FURTHER READING

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

8 Foundations of Design

NONEXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS

EXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS

CHAPTER SUMMARY

FURTHER READING

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

9 Small-N Designs

SINGLE-CASE EXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS

NATURALISTIC CASE-STUDY DESIGNS

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER SUMMARY

FURTHER READING

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

10 The Participants: Sampling and Ethics

SAMPLING

ETHICAL ISSUES

CHAPTER SUMMARY

FURTHER READING

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

11 Evaluation Research

PREPARATION FOR EVALUATING A SERVICE

MONITORING THE PROCESS OF SERVICE DELIVERY

OUTCOME EVALUATION

CHAPTER SUMMARY

FURTHER READING

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

12 Analysis, Interpretation, and Dissemination

QUALITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS

QUANTITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS

INTERPRETATION

DISSEMINATION

THE END

CHAPTER SUMMARY

FURTHER READING

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

13 Epilogue

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

References

Author Index

Subject Index

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

Chapter 02

Table 2.1 Characteristics of professional models

Chapter 03

Table 3.1 Hypothesis-testing and exploratory approaches to research

Chapter 04

Table 4.1 Examples of measures classified by source and approach

Table 4.2 Simplified example of a two-way classification table

Table 4.3 Possible results of a binary diagnostic test for depression

Table 4.4 How reliability and validity involve generalizing across measurement facets

Table 4.5 Suggested reliability and validity standards

Chapter 05

Table 5.1 Summary of Elliott et al.’s (1999) evolving guidelines

Chapter 07

Table 7.1 Five dimensions of observed behavioral process

Chapter 08

Table 8.1 Four validity types (Cook & Campbell, 1979)

Chapter 10

Table 10.1 Estimated sample sizes for t-tests

Table 10.2 Estimated sample sizes for correlations

List of Illustrations

Chapter 02

Figure 2.1 The research cycle

Chapter 06

Figure 6.1 Examples of anchor words for Likert scales

Chapter 09

Figure 9.1 The AB design

Figure 9.2 The ABAB design

Figure 9.3 The multiple-baseline design

Figure 9.4 The changing-criterion design

Chapter 10

Figure 10.1 The universe, the target population, and the sample

Chapter 11

Figure 11.1 The audit cycle

Figure 11.2 The impact model

Figure 11.3 Need, demand, and supply: influences and overlaps.

Chapter 12

Figure 12.1 Three criteria for clinical significance.

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Research Methods in Clinical Psychology

An Introduction for Students and Practitioners

Third Edition

Chris Barker and Nancy Pistrang

University College London

and

Robert Elliott

University of Strathclyde

This edition first published 2016© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barker, Chris, 1948–Research methods in clinical psychology : an introduction for students and practitioners / Chris Barker and Nancy Pistrang, University College London and Robert Elliott, University of Strathclyde. – Third edition.  pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-118-77320-8 (paperback)I. Pistrang, Nancy. II. Elliott, Robert, 1950– III. Title. RC467.8.B37 2016 616.89–dc23    2015019386

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Vintage background © Nik Merkulov / Shutterstock

Preface to the Third Edition

The first edition of this book came out more than 20 years ago, and the second more than 10. A lot has gone on during that 20-year time span, both in the book’s subject matter and in our own professional lives. When we wrote the first edition, we were junior academics, and the research methods literature was much smaller and easier to master than it is now. We learned an enormous amount in the course of writing that first edition text; as has frequently been observed (originally by the physicist Frank Oppenheimer, according to Wikipedia), the best way to learn something is to teach it. As our careers have progressed, so has the methodological literature, which seems to have outgrown our own capacity (and probably anyone else’s) to keep up with it. Such is its volume and complexity that it has seemed as big a task to produce this third edition from the second as it did producing the first from scratch. However, we have once again relished getting to grips with the new ideas ourselves and attempting to communicate them clearly to our readers.

Since the previous edition, there have been major changes in how information is accessed and processed, and in how research is conceptualized and conducted. Some of the most important additions or changes in this edition are systematic review methods and literature-searching methods (see Chapter 3), structured guidelines for appraising the research literature (see Chapters 3 and 8) and for preparing journal articles (see Chapter 8), modern psychometric methods (e.g., item response theory, see Chapter 4), guidance on choosing between different qualitative approaches (see Chapter 5), and the internet as a medium for conducting psychological research (see Chapters 6 and 10).

When we began updating the second edition to produce this one, we initially thought that we would completely revamp the references, as several had endured since the first edition and were written before many of our readers would have been born. We had a general “out with the old, in with the new,” “let’s clear out the attic” attitude. However, as the writing progressed, it quickly became apparent that many of the old references actually hold up rather well, several being classic papers that all clinical psychologists need to be aware of. So, while we have updated many of the citations, the end result represents what we hope is a judicious mix of ancient and modern.

The choice of title led to some debate among the authors and publishers. The first edition, which was entitled Research Methods in Clinical and Counseling Psychology, had its genesis in our teaching on clinical and counseling psychology courses. The second edition, entitled Research Methods in Clinical Psychology, focused on clinical psychologists as a primary readership, with counseling, health, educational, and community psychologists also being very much in our minds. The book should really be called something like Research Methods in Clinical Psychology and Allied Professions, but that is too clunky and unfocused. In our time, we have taught research methods to students and professionals in many other allied fields, including health, community, counseling, and educational psychology, psychiatry, speech therapy, and nursing. We want this text to be accessible to all of these audiences and more. We hope that potential readers from other disciplines will judge the book by the content not just the title—we intend it to be useful for not just clinical psychologists, but also for a broad range of mental health disciplines.

We have once again tried to make the text reader-friendly by having frequent bullet-point summaries of the important points in boxes, and a chapter summary and suggested reading at the end of each chapter. In this edition, we have added questions for self-reflection, also at the end of each chapter. Personal preferences are an often unacknowledged influence on the research that one conducts, and the questions for reflection are designed to help readers explore what they think and feel about the various approaches and issues that we have described in each chapter. We have also, as with the last edition, uploaded supplementary material for readers and instructors onto the book’s website.

A few matters of grammar and style are worth noting. We have generally preferred vernacular to supposedly purist forms of expression. Thus, following recent trends, we have usually used the colloquial “they” to indicate a single person of unspecified gender, rather than the awkward sounding “he or she.” “Data” is treated as a collective noun either in the singular or the plural, as sense dictates, as in common speech. We are fully aware that it is a plural noun in Latin, but like “agenda,” also a Latin plural, it is frequently used in the singular in spoken English. We have also not hesitated to boldly split infinitives: the supposed rule prohibiting this practice now seems antiquated.

As with previous editions, we have tried to make this one relevant both to North American and to British readers. We are a transatlantic authorship team (one Brit, one American, and one who is both), although we are all currently working in the United Kingdom. Due to limitations in our abilities and experience, we have restricted most of our examples to the English-speaking world. However, we have taught research methods in other countries, and have had some instructive correspondence with our Asian, African, and Australian readers, so we hope that the book can be useful to readers outside of North America and the British Isles.

The first two authors are fortunate to work at University College London (UCL) in London’s Bloomsbury district, which is probably the best place on the planet for library access. For this book, we have relied on three excellent libraries – the UCL library, the University of London Research Library, and the British Library – which are all within easy walking distance. UCL has provided us with an outstanding selection of electronic journals, the University of London Research Library has a superb reference collection of psychology books for browsing, and the British Library is a magnificent public resource capable of supplying our every bibliographic want. Long may these institutions flourish!

Revising this book has also brought home once more what an excellent research methods education we three all received in our graduate school days at the University of California, Los Angeles. We were exposed to the full gamut of methodological options, by first-rate statistics and measurement instructors in the Psychology Department and innovative qualitative researchers in Sociology. This book is a tribute to all of our own instructors and mentors.

We are grateful to our many academic friends and colleagues—both past and present—in our own universities and our wider scientific circles, for inspiring us, keeping us up to date, and challenging us. We would also like to thank the following for their help with preparing the current edition. Several colleagues gave us suggestions or generously commented on chapter drafts: John Cape, Kate Cheney, James Coyne, Ravi Das, Allen Dyer, Peter Fonagy, Andy Fugard, Vyv Huddy, Zoe Huntley, Narinder Kapur, John King, Henry Potts, Tony Roth, James Schuurmans-Stekhove, and Francine Wood. Special thanks to Will Mandy for looking at several chapters at short notice. Marie Brown capably assisted with the library research, efficiently chasing up some of the more obscure references, and road-tested several parts of the text. Rachel Schön kindly assisted with the indexing. Shamil Wanigaratne and Sue Salas have been encouraging and supportive readers over three editions (and three countries). Our thanks to the team at Wileys: Andrew McAleer, who first encouraged us to undertake this rewrite, Karen Shield, our project editor, Amy Minshull, the editorial assistant, Nivedha Gopathy, the project manager, and Stephen Curtis, our eagle-eyed copy-editor. Thanks also to those who helped with previous editions: John Cape, Lorna Champion, Linda Clare, Michael Coombs, Neil Devlin, Jerry Goodman, Les Greenberg, Dick Hallam, Connie Hammen, Wendy Hudlass, Maria Koutantji, David Rennie, Laura Rice, Joe Schwartz, Pam Smith, and Mark Williams with the first edition, and Anna Barker, Chris Brewin, John Cape, Kate Cheney, Pasco Fearon, Dick Hallam, David Shapiro, Jonathan Smith, Lesley Valerio, and Vivian Ward with the second. And, finally, many thanks to all of our students, past and present, for their engagement with our teaching and supervision, and for continuing to keep us on our toes.

Even though we have benefited enormously from the advice and scrutiny of our colleagues and students, the responsibility for any residual errors remains our own. The process of preparing this edition has unearthed some minor mistakes in the previous one, and doubtless others still lurk herein. If you spot something wrong, please let us know, and we will post a correction on the book’s website. We appreciate any feedback, positive, negative, or neutral, from our readers. We hope that this book will prove a useful resource in your own consumption or production of research, or in simply appreciating what a complex business it all is.

About the Companion Website

The companion website for the book, at www.wiley.com/go/barker provides supplementary material for readers, both students and instructors. For each chapter there are PowerPoint slides, questions for reflection, internet resources, and more.

1Introduction: The Research Process

KEY POINTS IN THIS CHAPTER

Research tells a story.

Research raises questions as well as answering them.

There is a vigorous debate within psychology about what constitutes legitimate research.

This text takes a stance of methodological pluralism: of fitting the research method to the research question.

The research process can be divided into four main stages: groundwork, measurement, design, and analysis/interpretation.

Research tells a story. Ideally, it resembles a detective story, which begins with a mystery and ends with its resolution. Researchers have a problem that they want to investigate; the story will reach its happy ending if they find a solution to that problem.

In practice, however, things aren’t quite that simple, and the actual picture is closer to an adventure story, with many unexpected twists and turns. Often, the resolution of a research project is uncertain: it doesn’t answer your initial research question, rather it tells you that you were asking the wrong question in the first place, or that the way that you went about answering it was misconceived. You struggle with discouragement and frustration; perhaps you come out of it feeling lucky to have survived the thing with your health and relationships (mostly) intact. So, if you enjoy research and are determined to make a contribution, you organize a sequel, in which you try out a better question with a better designed study, and so it goes on. Another way of putting it is that there are stories within stories, or a continuing series of stories. Each individual research project tells one story, the series of projects conducted by a researcher or a research team forms a larger story, and the development of the whole research area a yet larger story. And this progression continues up to the level of the history of science and ideas over the centuries.

Another way that things are not so simple is that not all researchers agree on what constitutes a legitimate story. The situation in psychology is analogous to developments in literature. On the one hand is the traditional research story, rather like a Victorian novel, which has a clear beginning, middle, and end, and is expected to provide a more or less faithful reflection of reality. On the other hand, in this modern and postmodern age, we encounter narratives that do not follow an orderly chronological sequence or tie up neatly at the end. Furthermore, they may not claim to represent, or may even reject the idea of, reality.

These developments in literature and psychology reflect general intellectual developments during the last century, which have ramifications across many branches of European and English-speaking culture, both artistic and scientific. Our own field of interest, psychology in general and clinical psychology in particular, has been going through a vigorous debate about the nature of research – that is, which of these narratives we can call research and which are something else. Scholars from various corners of the discipline of psychology (e.g., Carlson, 1972; Driver-Linn, 2003; Gergen, 2001; Rogers, 1985; Sarbin, 1986) have questioned the validity and usefulness of psychology’s version of the traditional story, which has been called “received-view” or “old-paradigm” research: essentially a quantitative, hypothetico-deductive approach, which relies on linear causal models. These and other critics call for the traditional approach to be replaced, or at least supplemented, by a more qualitative, discovery-oriented, nonlinear approach to research.

This debate, as Kimble (1984) pointed out, is a contemporary manifestation of William James’s (1907) distinction between tough-minded and tender-minded ways of thinking, which is itself a translation into psychological terms of the old debate in philosophy over empiricism (Aristotle) versus rationalism (Plato). However, it is simplistic to view this debate as two-sided, with researchers being either in one camp or the other. It is better viewed as reflecting multiple underlying attitudes, for example, preferences for quantitative versus qualitative methods, attitudes towards exploratory versus confirmatory research questions, experimental control versus real-world relevance, and so on (Kimble, 1984).

One consequence of the lack of consensus about acceptable approaches to research is that people who are doing research for the first time may experience considerable anxiety – rather like the existential anxiety that accompanies a loss of meaning (Yalom, 1980). Undertaking a research project without being clear about what standards are to be used to evaluate it is an unsettling experience. Furthermore, there is a political dimension, since people in powerful positions in the academic world – journal editors, grant reviewers, and university professors – often adhere to the more traditional models.

This anxiety is exacerbated because the rules are not always made explicit, which may make beginning researchers feel, like Alice in Wonderland, that they are in a strange country with mysterious and arbitrary rules that are continually being changed. Researchers are constantly reminded, in various ways, to behave themselves properly in accordance with these scientific rules; as the Red Queen said to Alice, “Look up, speak nicely and don’t twiddle your fingers all the time!” This experience can be understandably off-putting for people trying to enter the research wonderland for the first time.

We will reconsider these issues in Chapters 2, 4, and 5, which address the conceptual underpinnings of research. However, it is worth stating at the outset that our own stance is one of methodological pluralism. We don’t think that any single approach to research (or, indeed, that psychological research itself) has all the answers; thus, we believe that researchers need to have at their disposal a range of methods, appropriate to the problems being investigated. We have considerable sympathy with the critics of the received view, but are not convinced that the consequence of accepting their criticisms is to abandon traditional quantitative methods, or even research in general. Indeed, we feel that to do so would be a disaster for psychology and for society. Fortunately, we see increasing signs that it is possible to articulate a synthesis of the old- and new-paradigm traditions, that there are general principles common to rigorous research within whatever paradigm, and that it is possible to lay out an overall framework which organizes different approaches to research and clarifies the ways in which they can complement one another. Learning to do psychological research is partly a process of learning disciplined enquiry according to these principles within this general framework.

At the same time, there are rules of good practice specific to each type of research. We will base our methodological pluralism on a principle of appropriate methodologies (by analogy to the catch phrase “appropriate technology” in the economics of development). By this, we mean that the methods used should flow out of the research questions asked. Different questions lend themselves to different methods. To resume our literary analogy, like the different literary genres (mystery, romance, science fiction, autobiography, etc.), we can think of different research genres, such as survey research, randomized clinical trials, systematic case studies, and in-depth qualitative interview studies. Each of these research genres has different stories to tell and different rules of good practice.

We will attempt to clarify these general principles and specific rules of good practice, so that you will be in a better position to appreciate other people’s research. We hope that this will help you feel less intimidated about the prospect of conducting your own research. Also, there is value in making the rules of research explicit, so that one can challenge them more effectively, and thus contribute to the debate about how psychological research should be conducted.

Research is demanding: it does require clear and rigorous thought, as well as perseverance and stamina, but it is also fascinating and exciting, and, we hope, beneficial to the public that psychologists ultimately profess to serve.

The Research Process

This book is structured around a simple chronological framework, which we call the research process: that is, the sequence of steps that researchers go through during a project. The steps can be grouped into four major stages. Like all such frameworks, it is idealized, in that the stages are not always distinct and may interact with each other. However, we find it a useful way of thinking about how research is conducted, both one’s own and other people’s.

Groundwork

(

Chapter 3

). This stage involves both scientific issues – choosing the topic, reviewing the literature, specifying the conceptual model, formulating the research questions – and also practical issues – resolving organizational, political, financial, or ethical problems. Sometimes researchers give the groundwork short shrift, being anxious to get on with the business of running the project itself. However, we will argue that devoting careful thought at this stage repays itself with interest during the course of the project.

Measurement

(

Chapters 4

to

7

). Having formulated the research questions, the next step is to decide how to measure the psychological constructs of interest. We are here using the term “measurement” in its broadest sense, to encompass qualitative as well as quantitative approaches to data collection.

Design

(

Chapters 8

to

11

). Research design issues concern when and from whom the data will be collected. For example: Who will the participants be? Will there be an experimental design with a control group? How many pre- and post-assessments will there be? What ethical concerns need to be addressed? These design issues can usually be considered independently of measurement issues.

The research questions, measurement procedures, and design together constitute the research protocol, the blueprint for the study. Having gone through these first three stages, researchers will usually conduct a small pilot study, whose results may cause them to rethink the protocol and possibly to conduct further pilots. Eventually the protocol is finalized; the last stage then consists of implementing it.

Analysis, interpretation, and dissemination

(

Chapter 12

). The data are collected, analyzed, interpreted, written up, possibly published, and, let us hope, acted upon.

These stages in the research process constitute our framework for the book. However, we will also examine some key philosophical, professional, and political issues that are central to thinking about the whole research enterprise (Chapters 2, 4, and 5). Although following these arguments is not necessary for learning purely technical research skills, it is important to understand the wider context in which research is being conducted, as doing so will lead to more focused, coherent, and ultimately useful research programs. It is also important to keep in mind that doing research is much more than the exercise of a set of techniques; carrying out research involves imagination and empathy, problem-solving skills and critical thinking, and ethical reflection and social responsibility.

The first part of this background material is given in the next chapter, which analyzes the meaning of some of the terms we have so far left undefined, such as “research” itself. We will also discuss why anyone might want to engage in research at all.

2Perspectives on Research

KEY POINTS IN THIS CHAPTER

Psychological research is situated within philosophical, professional, personal, and political contexts.