Counselor Effectiveness and Family-of-Origin Experiences: A Significant Relationship?

In this article, the authors investigate the relationship between family-of-origin experiences and counseling effectiveness of counselors in training.     

The Role of Social Contacts in the Successful Job Search

This study examined the impact of social contacts (“It's who you know, not what you know”) on job getting. Workers were interviewed to discover the source of information about their most recent job. Results show that social contacts were the most frequently used resources during the job-getting process and that these personal contacts were used more often in some occupational environments than in others.     

An Integrated Treatment Program for Psychogenic Pain

The family characteristics associated with the presence of recurrent abdominal pain are identified. The involvement on the pediatrician and the effects of this involvement on the patient, family, and perpetuation of the symptoms are described. A successful therapeutic program combining behavior modification and family therapy is elaborated. Changes in the structure and functioning of the family are vital to the outcome of therapy and the prevention of recurrence of symptoms.     

Technolatry, Methodolatry, and the Results of Family Therapy

Wells and Dezen's revisited results of research on the outcomes of nonbehavioral family therapy are themselves revisited. While their conclusions are largely defensible in terms of conventional criteria for research design and for assessing change in psychotherapy, we question whether such standard criteria are sufficient for studying the outcomes of family therapy. Moreover, Wells and Dezen's preoccupation with therapeutic technology at the expense of relationship factors and of "objective" change measures at the expense of more inferential measures severely limits the clinical and conceptual meaningfulness of their review.     

Ideologies,Idols (and Graven Images?): Rejoinder to Gurman and Kniskern

Three major issues raised in Gurman and Kniskern's commentary are discussed. These are (a) the suitability of established research design criteria for studying the outcome of family therapy; (b) the impact of therapist relationship factors on therapy outcome; and (c) the place of concrete or objective change measures in psychotherapy outcome research. Areas of agreement and disagreement with Gurman and Kniskern's observations are identified.     

The Effects and Effectiveness of Marital Therapy A Review of Outcome Research

The literature on outcome research in marital therapy is reviewed. Issues considered include the nature of outcome criteria, the need to establish a base line against which to measure improvement, and therapeutic effectiveness as a function of treatment type and time-in-therapy. The overall improvement rate across a heterogeneous collection of patients, therapists, and treatment modalities was 66 per cent, suggesting, conservatively, at least a moderately positive therapeutic effect in light of the judgment that “spontaneous” rates appear to be much lower in marital than in individual therapy. Evidence of deterioration in marital therapy also was discovered. No support was found for the contention that co-therapy is more effective than treatment of the couple by a single therapist. The needs of future research in the outcome of marital therapy are discussed and possible fruitful directions for such investigations suggested.