The core elements of high-quality competency-based supervision are the same activities that have been used to train counselors in the clinical trials that established treatments as evidence-based: direct observation of counselors’ sessions and the use of performance feedback and individualized coaching (Baer et al., 2007).
Full Answer
What do we know about counseling research?
A second major domain of counseling research that informs evidence-based counseling practice, focuses on the counselor. The counselor is probably the most studied "object" in our research history. Much of that effort has been guided by a desire to understand how to train successful and effective counselors.
Is evidence-based counseling practice the future of counseling?
Regardless of one's position in regard to the "art vs. science" or "research vs. practice" debate, it seems clear that evidence-based counseling practice is the future of both the preparation of counselors and the practice of professional counseling.
Are some practices of counseling more efficacious than others?
More important for practice, research now points to a number of very stable trends that support the efficacy of some practices of counseling over others, the differential value of some aspects of counseling over others, and effectiveness of matching certain client problems with specific counseling models (Sexton et. al, 1997).
What are the best practices in counseling?
In fact, the research evidence has become so reliable that the term "best practices" is now defined as approaches to counseling practice that have empirical evidence to support their effectiveness.
What treatment methods do counselors use?
Therapeutic TechniquesCBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) The belief of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is that a person's mood is directly related to the person's thoughts. ... DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) Skills. ... Play Therapy. ... Sand Tray Therapy. ... EMDR(Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
What are some research backed strategies to recognize and treat mental illness?
Top Evidence-based Practices to ConsiderCognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)Exposure Therapy.Functional Family Therapy (FFT)Assertive Community Treatment (ACT)Motivational Interviewing.
What are three 3 strategies you can use to develop a therapeutic relationship with a client with a mental illness?
Some strategies that may help include:Help the client feel more welcome. ... Know that relationships take time. ... Never judge the client. ... Manage your own emotions. ... Talk about what the client wants from therapy. ... Ask more or different questions. ... Don't make the client feel rejected. ... Refer to another therapist.More items...•
What are the three major approaches to treatments?
With the agreement of these partners, the scope of the expert assessment covered three major psychotherapeutic approaches—the psychodynamic (psychoanalytical) approach, the cognitive-behavioural approach, and family and couple therapy—often used to care for defined disorders of adults, adolescents, or children.
What is evidence-based treatment approach?
Evidence-based treatment (EBT) refers to treatment that is backed by scientific evidence. That is, studies have been conducted and extensive research has been documented on a particular treatment, and it has proven to be successful.
How do you know if a treatment is evidence-based?
Therapists who use treatments based on science engage in what is called “evidence-based practice” (EBP). If the treatments they use have scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of the treatments, they are called evidence-based treatments (EBTs).
How can developing self-awareness help you to care for a client with a mental illness?
Being self-aware can enable the counselor to mark their 'ego boundaries,' and successfully discriminate between what belongs to them and what belongs to their clients. Secondly, self-awareness enables the counselor to make a 'conscious use of the self'.
What are strategies for promoting therapeutic communication?
Therapeutic Communication TechniquesUsing Silence. At times, it's useful to not speak at all. ... Accepting. ... Giving Recognition. ... Offering Self. ... Giving Broad Openings. ... Active Listening. ... Seeking Clarification. ... Placing the Event in Time or Sequence.More items...
What are therapeutic communication strategies?
Therapeutic communication techniques such as active listening, silence, focusing, using open ended questions, clarification, exploring, paraphrasing, reflecting, restating, providing leads, summarizing, acknowledgment, and the offering of self, will be described below.
What are the 5 therapy methods?
Approaches to psychotherapy fall into five broad categories:Psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapies. ... Behavior therapy. ... Cognitive therapy. ... Humanistic therapy. ... Integrative or holistic therapy.
How do we know if treatment has been successful discuss three different ways that the success of therapy can be assessed?
Ways of Assessing Effectiveness. The effectiveness of a particular therapeutic approach can be assessed in three ways: client testimonials, providers' perceptions, and empirical research.
What are the 5 counselling theories and approaches?
Fortunately, almost all of the many individual theoretical models of counseling fall into one or more of six major theoretical categories: humanistic, cognitive, behavioral, psychoanalytic, constructionist and systemic.
What are the most common interventions?
Two of the most common interventions are individual counseling and psychoeducational group interventions. How the action research framework can be used for evidence-based practice is described briefly for each practice.
What are the challenges of counselor educators?
Consequently, the two concurrent challenges are 1) having counselor educators (outcome researchers) produce sufficient volumes of evidence and 2) training counselor practitioners to find, interpret and use the evidence. Ironically, the circumstances create a codependency. Counselors are dependent on counselor educators to conduct ...
What is accountability and action research?
Accountability and action research. Counseling practitioners who evaluate their local interventions can use the findings to improve their practices and to be accountable to their stakeholders. This accountability process involves action research as opposed to outcome research.
What is the difference between evidence based practice and accountability?
While evidence-based practice is a product of outcome research findings, accountability activities employ action research methods. Evidence-based practice is synonymous with aptitude testing, having a focus on how previously collected data can be applied to future performances. On the other hand, accountability is akin to achievement testing. The focus is on past performance to seek evidence of how well interventions have worked. Therefore, evidence-based practice and accountability appear to be two different concepts, each of which is very important for the counseling profession but apparently difficult for counseling practitioners to do well.
What is outcome research?
Outcome research is the domain and responsibility of trained researchers, who are usually employed in university settings. Therefore, counselor educators are included among those responsible for producing the evidence. The corresponding responsibility for counselors is to be willing and able to locate and use evidence-based interventions.
What are the motivations for evidence based practice?
Intrinsic motives include placing the well-being of our clients/patients/students at the forefront, desiring to discover and use the best practices available, and wanting to be respected as highly proficient professionals. Extrinsic motives include being eligible for insurance reimbursements, avoiding ethical and legal challenges, and saving one’s job from funding cuts or other negative employment decisions. Unfortunately, too few counselors either conduct research or read research findings. Although they may value research intellectually, many lack confidence in their ability to use research findings.
What are the goals of action research?
Goals for action research include acquiring useful local knowledge for program improvement, involving local stakeholders in the process, being open to the viability of a variety of data sources and anticipating that constructive actions/. decisions will follow the data.
What is the field of addictions counseling?
The addictions field is emerging with various types of disorders, and counselors are finding themselves to be overwhelmed and incompetent in handling the increasing demands for diagnosis, assessment and treatment of addictions in general and specifically PAs. Although counselors are expected to obtain continuing education to keep abreast of the evolution of counseling in the field, clinicians who participated in this study indicated that they were overall ill-prepared to work with clients who are living with PAs. First, it is recommended that counselor education programs implement courses that include properly assessing, diagnosing and treating PAs.
What is PA in psychology?
PA is defined as any compulsive-like behavior that interferes with normal living and causes significant negative consequences in the person’s family, work and social life.
What is process addiction?
Process addictions are now an integral aspect of addictions treatment, diagnosis, and assessment. There is a gap in the literature related to process addictions which impacts counselors and clients due to lack of literature and knowledge on this new area. It also is hypothesized that there is a gap in continued education for incorporating treatment ...
Who first identified exercise addiction?
The term exercise addiction was first introduced by Glasser (1976), who studied long-distance runners and found out that most of them had an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Exercise addiction, or sports addiction, is a phenomenon typically found in athletes (McNamara & McCabe, 2012).
Do addictions coexist?
According to Carnes (2009) most addicts have more than one addiction, sustained recovery is more successful when all addictions present are addressed in counseling, and addictions do not merely coexist, but actually interact with each other. The term disorder is often used interchangeably with the term addiction.
How can counselors benefit from literature?
Counselors can benefit by tracing the literature from early sources through to contemporary research on any given issue. By doing so, people working at the coal face can frame up their own perspective based on the literature. This research-based perspective influences practice. When our perspectives are based on the best research available, our practice is more likely to be evidence based (Blaxter, Hughes, & Tight, 1996). For example, an issue that concerns us relates to how counselors exercising their social role in society and with their clients.
What is reflexivity in counseling?
Often our biases are uncovered in the midst of counseling practice, or as often happens, when counselors engage in research practice. We might rightly say that research practice is like a hot oven where bias can be highlighted and “burned off” more quickly. All the more challenging when dealing with questions that tend to be culturally predetermined like areas of gender, sexuality, race, or aspects of status. Likewise, reflexivity is a process of self analysis and social analysis that intentionally explores bias and prejudice, beliefs and values in order to circumvent issues that might arise when confronted with issues in counseling practice. From the research project noted above (Bowers et al., 2005a), historical analysis of mainstream treatment of homosexuality across time suggests that homophobia is a constituent of Western values towards sexual and gender difference. Likewise, research findings based on qualitative analysis of interview data suggests that specific expressions of homophobia in counselor’s attitudes and behaviours is an issue to be reckoned with. For example, participants’ expectations for therapist training and education appear to range from having very basic and “common sense” knowledge to having specialised awareness and skill. While participants did not expect all counselors to have specialised abilities, all the participants in the project wanted counselors to have what might be considered basic standards of care. These standards include a range of attitudes, skills, and abilities to meet the needs of clients. However, a paradox was observed when collecting these responses. What appeared to be a “basic skill” such as communicating empathy, respect, or positive regard appeared to be linked to “specialised” awareness, acceptance, and support of the life and cultures of minority people. The research suggests the need for practitioners to go the extra mile in order to work effectively with minority clients. This means that reflexivity among practitioners on these issues needs to follow a similar course to the researcher’s experience of gaining enlightenment during the research process. In some way or other bias and prejudice in these domains needs to be uncovered by counselors, and addressed through their own reflexive processes. Research appears to be a key factor in achieving these counselor-education and training goals. Likewise, qualitative research, in particular, appears to be relevant to counseling concerns, as it tends to raise intensive issues of meaning, values, and beliefs, which form essential and vital reflexive material for counselor development.
What is the view of research and clinical practice?
From this analysis issues of marginalisation enhanced a critical appraisal of how expressions of power translate into research and clinical environments . These and related theoretical issues in counseling research suggested that practitioners need to continually challenge our assumptions, normalise prejudice, and engage in processes of reflexivity. Research in this sense is a transformative discipline, and takes its validity in large measure from being context-congruent or appropriate.
What is the second major domain of counseling research that informs evidence-based counseling practice?
A second major domain of counseling research that informs evidence-based counseling practice, focuses on the counselor . The counselor is probably the most studied "object" in our research history. Much of that effort has been guided by a desire to understand how to train successful and effective counselors.
What is evidence based practice?
Evidence-based practice has the opportunity to move the profession of counseling out of its theoretical boxes and historical beliefs into an era of integrated practice in which counselors use the best of available science combined with clinical experience to successfully help a wide variety of clients. Evidence-based practices can provide a source of clinical knowledge that can increase a counselor's effectiveness with clients, become a basis of professional education and counselor development, and serve as a unifying force for the profession that will set the agenda for the next evolution of counseling.
Is the artificial dichotomy between research and practice irrelevant?
Two major issues make the artificial dichotomy between research and practice not only irrelevant but also potentially harmful to the current and future status of counseling practice and preparation. First, most practitioners know that today's landscape of counseling practice is one dominated by accountability.
Is theoretical orientation a factor in counseling?
The outcome research evidence has repeatedly found that theoretical orientation is not a major factor in the outcome of counseling. Instead, the research points to a set of "common factors" that seem to be part of effective counseling regardless of counselor, client, or theoretical orientation.
Is counseling process and outcome research reliable?
Furthermore, the counseling process and outcome research has grown into an undeniably reliable, valid, and necessary source of clinical practice knowledge. There is no question that much of the early research was irrelevant to practice.