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Psychotherapy research is usually focused on the following domains: basic, process, and outcome (Goldfried and Eubanks-Carter 2004). Outcome research predominates in the literature, though, as Persons (1991) has pointed out, traditional outcome studies can tell us only if a patient has changed as a result of some intervention; they are of limited use in explaining how the patient has changed and what therapeutic mechanism has produced the change. At its best, psychotherapy research links process to outcome, and is representative of “real-world” clinicians and the heterogeneous presentation of patients they encounter (Weisz, Doss, and Hawley 2005).
Despite the added complexity of process research and the need to link it to outcome, it is the task of psychotherapy researchers to make ardent attempts toward the development of quantitative methods that can capture the idiosyncrasies of the psychotherapy hour, even though some may question the prospects for ultimate success in this endeavor. However, this does not mean that psychotherapy process research is a quixotic battle. To recognize limitation is not to conclude that it is useless to attempt an