You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This poster is based on a dissertation presented by Alla Gordon to the faculty of the School of Human Service Professions of Widener University in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of psychology (Sanjay Nath, dissertation advisor).
To discover how theoretical assumptions determine dependent measures and the concept of change, this study compared the outcome research of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) with that of psychodynamic therapies (PDT). The latter category includes all psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapies, as well as psychoanalysis. CBT and PDT were chosen for comparison because they represent opposite epistemological assumptions regarding personality.
The study's primary hypotheses are that CBT outcome studies will mostly measure decreases in symptom states and will rarely focus on personality traits or increases in mental capacities, while outcome studies of PDT (operationally defined as any therapy that targets the locus of pathology in deficits and conflicts in the dynamic unconscious) will tend to measure both symptom state reduction, personality trait changes (as found in personality disorders and structure), and increased mental capacities.
Empirical pre-post treatment outcome research (on both efficacy and effectiveness) was selected from CBT and PDT outcome studies found in PsycINFO. PsycINFO is an electronic bibliographic database that provides abstracts and articles of the scholarly literature in psychology and related fields and contains more than 2.6 million records. Although all search engines have flaws and inherent selection biases, PsycINFO was chosen not only as a source, but also as a method of selection. This was to help reduce experimenter subjectivity in the initial selection of studies. Also, any search engine errors should be equally distributed to the independent variables.
The following criteria were used in the literature search: (1) theoretical orientation (“CBT” or