Research and Practitioner Decision Making

Practices are the activities engaged in by people to achieve a goal. The goal of psychotherapy is to assist people in improving the quality of their lives. Often improving quality of life involves helping people gain relief from distressful and hampering symptoms; on other occasions (e.g., positive psychology), it involves supporting people to achieve personal empowerment and the actualization of their potentials. Although there is general agreement among clinical psychologists on the goal of psychotherapy, there is a lack of agreement on which activities can best lead to achieving that goal with the individuals served by psychotherapy practitioners.1 Practical knowledge (know-how) is knowledge about what to do to achieve a goal. People develop a fund of practical knowledge during their lives about how to accomplish daily tasks. They draw on various sources in the development of their practical knowledge. They come to know how to accomplish various things through personal trial and error, through imitating others ’ successful actions, through testimonies about what works from parents, friends, and authorities. In our culture, the most reliable and authoritative source of how-know is generally held to be science. Those who practice science have performed experiments that demonstrat