Research generally supports the conclusion that, like most psychotherapies, marital and family therapies are more effective than no treatment at all. But the authors of five past reviews of this literature have reached conflicting conclusions about whether or not family and marital therapies are more effective than other kinds of therapies. Three reviews have concluded that such therapies are more effective than alternative treatments; one review even suggests that such therapies are also more effective than individual therapies for both family and individual problems. But the other two reviews concluded that available evidence fails to support the special effectiveness of these therapies compared to alternative treatments. The proposed research seeks to contribute to a resolution of this controversy. Specifically, the investigators will conduct a meta- analysis of this literature, coding and quantifying three aspects of 300-500 individual studies from both published and unpublished sources: (1) outcomes, (2) methodological characteristics of the studies, and (3) characteristics of treatments and surrounding circumstances. The resulting data will be used to study three a priori hypotheses about family and marital therapy, and to explore a variety of other matters. The a priori hypotheses are (1) that reviews that gave preference to the interpretation of studies with high internal validity were more likely to find no special effects for these therapies than were reviews that also interpreted studies with low internal validity; (2) that these therapies will be found more effective in university or laboratory settings than in other field settings; and (3) that a publication bias exists such that unpublished studies are more likely to report small or nonsignificant treatment effect. The exploratory analyses will examine how the effects of family and marital therapies vary as a function of methodological characteristics of the study, and of characteristics of treatment and surrounding circumstances.
| Shadish, W R; Montgomery, L M; Wilson, P et al. (1993) Effects of family and marital psychotherapies: a meta-analysis. J Consult Clin Psychol 61:992-1002 |
| Shadish Jr, W R; Sweeney, R B (1991) Mediators and moderators in meta-analysis: there's a reason we don't let dodo birds tell us which psychotherapies should have prizes. J Consult Clin Psychol 59:883-93 |
