Abstract
This chapter introduces fundamental elements of RCT design, with an equal interest into the advantages and disadvantages of using RCTs in counselling and psychotherapy research. With illustrative examples, it explores rewards and challenges of conducting an RCT together with ‘know how’ to begin critiquing published RCT studies. The chapter introduces RCT as resting on a positivist approach, a medical model and explores this in context of regular critique from social constructionist and humanistic approaches. RCTs may not be designed to investigate process issues, or the complex, nuanced experiences that happen in the therapy room–but this chapter explains how mixed methods approaches with inclusion of qualitative components within a trial (as in the example of ETHOS a humanistic school counselling project) are possible. The chapter highlights how institutions and policy makers use results from RCTs to make decisions regarding therapeutic interventions for their patients and populations. Knowing the effect an intervention has on patients through clinical trials enables such stakeholders to make population-level decisions, and by ignoring RCTs, we could miss out on important and interesting research findings that support, improve or challenge our practice in important ways.
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Stafford, M.R. (2020). Understanding Randomized Control Trial Design in Counselling and Psychotherapy. In: Bager-Charleson, S., McBeath, A. (eds) Enjoying Research in Counselling and Psychotherapy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55127-8_13
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