Evidence-Based Therapies: Translating Research into Practice

Abstract

A plethora of evidence exists supporting the use of certain clinical practices for children and adolescents over others (e.g., Kazdin et al., 1990; Weiss & Weisz, 1995; Weisz et al., 1995), yet current research shows that practitioners rarely use these interventions in their own practice (e.g., Weersing et al., 2002) and that therapy conducted in community settings is not as effective as therapy conducted in research settings (e.g., Weiss et al., 1995, 1999). Thus, practices with evidence of being helpful are not available to most children and adolescents who seek treatment. An even greater challenge involves recent evidence suggesting that the relative advantages of evidence-based practices documented in the laboratory may not hold up in real-world settings (e.g., Barrington et al., 2005). Thus, at least two related problems appear to face the field: (1) Despite years of documentation of the promising effects of evidence-based practices, their penetration into practice settings is extremely limited; and (2) the quality and relevance of laboratory findings on treatment may not universally apply to real-world applied settings. However, despite leading researchers’ having emphasized moving treatment research into practice settings for over a decade (e.g., Kazdin et al., 1990; Weisz et al., 1995) and policy makers and funding sources encouraging the rapid development of dissemination research (e.g., Chambers et al., 2005; National Advisory Mental Health Council Workgroup on Child and Adolescent Mental Health Intervention Development and Deployment, 2001; National Institutes of Health, 2002; Norquist et al., 1999), only a handful of evidence-based practices have been examined in “real-world” settings in the youth mental health literature to date (Barrington et al., 2005; Henggeler et al., 1992; Mufson et al., 2004). To address these matters, this chapter begins with a discussionof the possible reasons for the relatively slow translation of research to practice, follows with a brief review of current models of dissemination, and finishes with a summary of an alternative perspective to addressing not only problems with dissemination but also problems with the relevance and generalizability of intervention research.