The main objective of this review was to provide a quantitative and methodologically sound evaluation of existing treatments for bereavement and grief reactions in children and adolescents. Two meta-analyses were conducted: 1 on controlled studies and 1 on uncontrolled studies. The 2 meta-analyses were based on a total of 27 treatment studies…

Forty-eight child psychotherapy outcome studies offering direct comparisons of an individual child treatment group to a combined parent-child/family therapy treatment group were included in this meta-analytic review. Results indicate that combined treatments produced a moderate effect beyond the outcomes achieved by individual child treatments,…

Evaluating psychotherapeutic outcome is an important endeavor given psychology's focus on identifying effective treatments. There is ample evidence to suggest that psychotherapy interventions for children and adolescents are effective. Unfortunately, the child and adolescent psychotherapy outcome literature lags behind the adult-focused outcome…

Grief therapies with children are becoming increasingly popular in the mental health community. Nonetheless, questions persist about how well these treatments actually help with children's adjustment to the death of a loved one. This study used meta-analytic techniques to evaluate the general effectiveness of bereavement interventions with…

Conducted meta-analysis of 108 well-designed outcome studies using 4- through 18-year-old subjects to examine effectiveness of psychotherapy with children and adolescents. Overall, findings revealed significant, durable effects of treatment that differed somewhat with client age and treatment method but which were reliably greater than zero for…

Applies meta-analysis to school-based outcome studies of counseling and psychotherapy within a 10-year period. Results support the effectiveness of school-based therapeutic interventions, although this conclusion is offered with some caution. Findings apply almost exclusively to group interventions. Discusses implication for practice and…

Serious sequelae of youth depression, plus recent concerns over medication safety, prompt growing interest in the effects of youth psychotherapy. In previous meta-analyses, effect sizes (ESs) have averaged 0.99, well above conventional standards for a large effect and well above mean ES for other conditions. The authors applied rigorous analytic…

The major youth psychotherapy meta-analyses have relied on published studies, which may have led to biased effect size estimates. To examine this possibility, the authors compared 121 dissertations with 134 published studies and found the following: (a) few differences on individual methodological variables, but, overall, stronger methodology in…

In studies of the usefulness of psychotherapy with children and adolescents, clinical therapy has markedly poorer outcomes than laboratory studies. Proposals to bridge the gap include enriching the data base on treatment effects by clinical practitioners, identifying the features of research therapy that account for positive outcomes, and…

Evaluated 18 child therapy outcome studies containing 26 treatment/control comparisons on at least 1 language measure. Results indicated that child therapy had significant positive impact of children's language proficiencies; individual was superior to group treatment. Trends emerged suggesting relationships between magnitude of language change…

Evaluated the hypothesis that the apparent superiority of behavioral interventions among children is due to differences in the methodological quality of studies of behavioral and nonbehavioral treatments. Meta-analytic results found little support for this hypothesis. Because meta-analysis is a correlational technique, these results should be…

This article provides a brief overview of the outcome research on psychotherapy with children and adolescents. Outcome research indicates that psychotherapy can be effective with both children and adolescents, with meta-analyses indicating that youth who participated in this type of intervention tended to score on the outcome measures half of a…

A meta-analysis of nine studies on psychotherapy with persons who have mental retardation found a wide range of research designs, types of interventions, and participants. The evaluation also pointed to a moderate degree of change in outcome measure and moderate effectiveness in terms of benefit to clients with mental retardation. (Contains…