Advanced Topics in Personality and Individual Differences - PSYX3336
Week 4 - Psychotherapeutic Interventions & Evidence Based Practice (Part 1)

Evidence Based Practice (EBP) (Copy)

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Evidence Based Practice integrates :

  • The best scientific evidence

  • The clinicians experience

  • The client’s preferences

EBP promotes and improves:

  • Effectiveness

  • Client outcomes

  • Ethical practice

  • Integrity

  • Alignment with latest research

Barriers to implementing EBP:

  • Access to an understanding of quality evidence

  • Limited resources

  • Time constraints

  • Resistance to change

  • Sub optimal training

  • Organisational culture

Levels of Evidence

Expert opinion

  • Better than a website

  • Better than a textbook

  • Substantial capacity for bias

Case study (N = 1)

  • Just one case

  • That case may be an outlier

  • E.g. Phineas Gage

Case Series / Time Series

  • Measurements are taken before and after an intervention

  • No control condition exists

  • E.g. John Snow, cholera outbreak in London

Case-control study

  • Retrospectively compares a population that has a certain outcome with the population. It doesn't have the same outcome.

  • E.g. revealing the association between smoking and lung cancer

Cohort study

  • Longitude and study of a group sharing common characteristics or experience to reveal different outcomes

  • Similar to a case-control study, but in reverse

  • Valuable first time, pushing cause and effect relationships

  • Requires large sample sizes and long follow-up periods

Non-randomised control trial

  • Compares outcomes for a control group and treatment group

  • Randomisation is not possible for ethical reasons, e.g. we can't randomise people to smoke or not

  • Cannot necessarily make causal claims

Randomise control trials (RCT)

  • The most rigorous design of health research

  • Randomisation balances, risk, factors, personality traits, identities, etc between the groups

Systematic review (SR)

  • A literature review that using systematic methods to identify select critically appraise and synthesise all available evidence

  • Accuracy is contingent on the available evidence base

  • Cannot include studies that have not been published

Meta – analysis (MA)

  • An objective statistical method that combines and analyses the results of multiple studies