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Practical Approaches to Applied Research and Program Evaluation for Helping Professionals
Practical Approaches to Applied Research and Program Evaluation for Helping Professionals is a comprehensive textbook that presents master’s-level counseling students with the skills and knowledge they need to successfully evaluate the effectiveness of mental health services and programs.
Each chapter, aligned with 2016 Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) standards, guides counseling students through study design and evaluation fundamentals that will help them understand existing research and develop studies to best assess their own applied research questions. Readers will learn the basics of research concepts as applied to evaluative tasks, the art of matching evaluative methods to questions, specific considerations for practice-based evaluative tasks, and practical statistical options matched to practice-based tasks.
Readers can also turn to the book’s companion website to access worksheets for practitioner and student planning exercises, spreadsheets with formulas for basic data analysis, a sample database, PowerPoint outlines, and discussion questions and activities aligned with each chapter.
Casey A. Barrio Minton, PhD, NCC, is a professor of counselor education and program coordinator for clinical mental health counseling at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is a past president of the Association for Assessment and Research in Counseling, the Southern Association for Counselor Education and Supervision, and Chi Sigma Iota International.
A. Stephen Lenz, PhD, LPC, NCC, is an associate professor of counselor education at the University of Mississippi. He is a past president of the Association for Assessment and Research in Counseling and editor of Counseling Outcome Research and Evaluation.
Practical Approaches to Applied Research and Program Evaluation for Helping Professionals
Casey A. Barrio Minton
A. Stephen Lenz
First published 2019 by Routledge
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To you. Thank you for your curiosity, energy, and spirit. Our profession and communities need them all.
Preface
We began this book with a passion for research, a firm belief in the power of mental health professionals to do good work, and a sense we needed to bridge an ever-growing gap between research and practice in our profession. We were tired of seeing students and master’s-level professionals plugging through statistics and research coursework they saw as a hurdle to jump over rather than a foundation on which to build years of practice. We nodded on the inside when they asked when they would ever need to hand-calculate a standard deviation or why they were learning one research method each week, knowing they would never implement a true study in the real world of master’s-level practice.
At the same time, we were inspired by life-changing, effective interventions and programs we have seen implemented in communities. Yet we were concerned about the long-term viability of these programs in the face of budget cuts and ever-growing expectations to demonstrate effectiveness. We envisioned a world where master’s-level practitioners wrap together art and science by bringing pieces of what we know about research into their practices and programs. We wanted to design a starting place for that conversion. So here we are.
In Part I, we highlight the importance of converging art, science, and practice. We introduce methodological and statistical concepts you will need to understand in order to navigate research literature, and we draw connections between those principles and evaluation activities you may find yourself doing in your own practice. Part I closes with attention to models for program development and systems of inquiry, with a special focus on program evaluation paradigms most relevant to practice.
Part II includes coverage of various research designs with a special program evaluation spin. In particular, we worked to illustrate how you might pull from these designs to understand your own programs and practices. We provided examples from our own clinical and educational experience, and we worked to make these principles come alive as something that might matter to you. We also provided you with templates for writing up results of your own projects.
Finally, we designed Part III to serve as a practical toolkit you will want to revisit time and again. We provide no-nonsense, direct advice for writing objectives, using literature to support practice, selecting assessment measures, managing data, presenting results, making changes based on data, and sharing findings with key stakeholders and
peers. We close with reminders regarding some important ethical and cultural considerations that will need attention throughout the process.
If you work through these pieces systematically, you should have a framework for building strong programs, designing evaluations to help you understand work with an individual or program, and analyzing data in ways that will help you understand what is working and what needs to change. In so doing, you will enhance your ability to advocate for those you serve through the development of strong, evidence-based, culturally relevant programs. Additionally, you will be able to use data to advocate for continued service and continually grow your potential.
acknowledgments
To Leah, who was my most beautiful, indispensable obstacle to completing this project and who fills every “lost” workday with wonder, joy, and a spark of hope for a more perfect future.
To Joel, who has been unwavering in support of my professional development and personal wellness and who will proudly promote this book without ever opening the cover.
I am indebted to Jennifer M. Hightower for careful reading, editorial precision, and student-focused feedback on the draft of this book. This work is stronger because of you.
~ Casey
To Rachel and Hayes—you have painted this canvas with all the colors of love, home, laughter, and encouragement. You are proof that life can be perpetually giving.
A special thank you to my team of Julia Dell’Aquila and Danielle Pester, who have been a second set of eyes and representatives of students and practitioners to make sure that chapter content never drifted too far from the practical.
~ Stephen
We had the distinctive honor of authoring this text. Our names are on the cover and the chapters are nuanced with the tones of our writing styles, yet a great deal of acknowledgment and gratitude belongs to our mentors, colleagues, and students who have helped us forge these perspectives during the course of our careers. To y’all, thank you.
We have much respect for the Routledge family, especially Senior Editor Anna A. Moore. Your perspectives, support, guidance, and calendar requests have been a gift through this process.
Lastly, we send whole-hearted appreciation and gratitude for those students and practitioners who are endeavoring in the applied research and evaluation projects that have potential to shape our communities for the better. Your creativity and energies are a gift. Thank you.
PART I embarking on an Inquiry
1
Where science Meets Practice
This chapter introduces the importance of applied research and program evaluation within counseling and related helping professions, with special attention to the importance of evidence-informed practice and scientist-practitioner models in professions often focused on abstract human relationships. We discuss development of the accountability era and introduce evidence-based practice and hierarchies of evidence in an attempt to illustrate how research is important to practice and how practice is important to research. The chapter concludes with an overview of this book, including strategies for optimizing learning.
BOX 1.1 CACREP STANDARDS AND CHAPTER LEARNING OUTCOMES
CACREP 2016 Standards
• 2.F.8.a the importance of research in advancing the counseling profession, including how to critique research to inform counseling practice
• 2.F.8.b identification of evidence-based counseling practices
• 6.B.1.d evidence-based counseling practices
Chapter Learning Outcomes
• Deepen understanding regarding the important role of research and program evaluation in ensuring ethical and effective practice
• Conceptualize hierarchies of evidence used to support evidence-based practices
PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY AND FOUNDATIONS
Professional counselors and related mental health professionals are charged with facilitating healing and optimal functioning for the most vulnerable of populations. Although the degree of focus may vary across professions and professionals, there is widespread agreement that such relationships and processes must attend to both art
and science. Certainly, integration of science in practice involving complex human experiences and relationships is an art.
Research and program evaluation have been of long-standing interest in mental health professions. The earliest and most famous counseling theorists—players such as Freud, Skinner, and Rogers—were scientists who developed and modified theories based on rigorous inquiry. As theorists began building silos of research, other scholars began considering common factors that cut across approaches in hopes they could help us better understand how counseling works and, in turn, how counselors best engage the science of counseling. Consider this excerpt from over 50 years ago:
The more we learn from our research, the more acutely aware we become of the limitations and inadequacies of our current theoretical formulations. Individual schools of counseling and psychotherapy cannot account for the multitude of variables which in all probability ultimately will constitute the process of psychotherapeutic personality change. However, these varied approaches have proved themselves to be of research value in the past. Any attempted formulations in the future should, therefore, leave themselves open to their potential contributions to research in the therapeutic process. Indeed, common elements, stemming from, yet cutting across these various theoretical approaches, have already demonstrated significant heuristic meaning.
(Truax & Carkhuff, 1964, p. 860)
More recently, scholars concluded:
Despite the field’s love affair with technique, nearly a half century of empirical investigation has revealed that the effectiveness of psychotherapy resides not in the many variables that ostensibly distinguish one approach from another. Instead, the success of treatment is principally found in the factors that all approaches share in common.
(Duncan, Miller, Wampold, & Hubble, 2010, p. xxvii)
Research and program evaluation are foundational to the work of mental health professionals. In professional counseling, the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) includes research and program evaluation as one of eight long-standing core curricular areas for master’s-level preparation. The American Counseling Association (2014) Code of Ethics requires counselors to work with clients to develop “counseling plans that offer reasonable promise of success” (p. 4) and counselor educators to “promote the use of techniques/procedures/ modalities that are grounded in theory and/or have an empirical or scientific foundation” (p. 14). Counseling psychologists have long held the scientist-practitioner or “Boulder Model” of integrating science as practice as a critical component of their professional identity (Vespia & Sauer, 2006), and American Psychological Association (www.apa.org) accreditation standards require substantial attention to research. APA’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (2017) requires that “psychologists’ work is based on established scientific and professional knowledge of the discipline” (Standard 2.04). Finally, the Council on Social Work Education
