Causal prescriptive statements are valued in the social sciences when there is the goal of helping people through interventions. The articles in this special issue cover different methods for testing causal prescriptive statements. This commentary identifies both virtues and liabilities of these different approaches. We argue that it is extremely…

Comments on The dissemination and implementation of evidence-based psychological treatments: A review of current efforts by Kathryn R. McHugh and David H. Barlow. The lead article in the February-March issue by McHugh and Barlow (2010) emphasized the need for "dissemination and implementation of evidence-based psychological treatments."…

To rule out threats to internal validity, proposes a control group design in which control group subjects are given an alternate treatment that they perceive as equally desirable to and that is similar in duration and procedures to the experimental treatment but that is concerned with dependent variables unrelated to the experimental treatment.…

Identifies and discusses three myths that pervade experimental counseling and psychotherapy: (1) that experimental subjects receive treatments appropriate to their clinical problems; (2) that the treatments are deployed as purported; and (3) that control groups customarily used by researchers allow them to determine the existence of a treatment…

Human relations development techniques, espoused by Carkhuff, fail to rest upon a sound empirical base, well illustrated by the research study reported by Wiggins. Comments aim at refuting the Wiggin's claim that his findings validate the Carkhuff paradigm as an effective model. (Author/BEF)

Employed a developmental context to discuss the problem of assessing both quantitative and qualitative deficits in the behavioral profiles of various diagnostic subcategories of developmentally disabled children. Methods of appropriate matching of control groups are suggested to help delineate specific and general deficits in subgroups of…

In the No Child Left Behind Act and the What Works Clearinghouse, the federal government has attempted to establish guidelines for the type of education research that U.S. schools should consider in selecting instructional programs and resources. The government's clear preference for the medical model--a powerful research design in such fields as…

This paper identifies methodological and practical problems in studies of child maltreatment, including developing classification schemes for multiple forms of maltreatment; distinguishing between chronic maltreatment and isolated incidents; choosing criteria for selecting comparison groups; determining whether comparison groups have experienced…

There has been an increasing emphasis in educational policies, practices and professional development on the capacity of educational leadership to exert a causal impact on student cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes. If the strict criteria of counterfactual causality are adhered to no causal inference could be made about the effects of…

Describes the increasing concern regarding ethical matters in psychotherapy research. Whereas institutional review procedures are required to protect human subjects, there has been inaction regarding ethics for other issues: psychotherapeutic treatment, particularly the use of no-treatment control groups and the termination of patients at the end…

This article examines the status of behavioral research on genetic mental retardation syndromes and finds that the field continues to struggle with three methodological issues: (1) how to think about control or contrast groups, (2) the interplay of behavioral phenotypes with development and other within-group variations, and (3) the efficacy of…

The Walsh and Carballo evaluation of the effectiveness of transitional bilingual education programs in five Massachusetts communities, has the following flaws: (1) the sample of school districts studied suffered from "self-selection bias"; (2) the sample does not include a single large, urban school district; (3) the student samples…

A solution to the problem of specification error due to excluded variables in statistical models of treatment effects in nonrandomized (nonequivalent) control group designs is presented. It involves longitudinal observation with at least two pretests. A maximum likelihood estimation program such as LISREL may provide reasonable estimates of…

The failure of educational research to fully allow for limitations in methodology when drawing conclusions is faulted. In addition to this, a failure on the part of the media--educational and other--to fully publicize these limitations is also criticized. Methodological shortcomings of the 1977-78 American Institutes of Research (AIR) study of…

Presents a prototypical case illustrating what positivist research means and argues that even critics of positivist research are logically committed to propositions that can be tested only through positivist research paradigms. The relationship between the nature of a community's research enterprise and its educational provisions must be causal.…