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Psychotherapy Research
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Fostering collaboration between researchers and

clinicians through building practice-oriented research:
An introduction
a b
Louis G. Castonguay & J. Christopher Muran
a
Department of Psychology, Penn State University, University Park, PA, USA
b
Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies, Adelphi University, Garden City, NY,
USA
Published online: 17 Oct 2014.

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and clinicians through building practice-oriented research: An introduction, Psychotherapy Research, 25:1, 1-5, DOI:
10.1080/10503307.2014.966348

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 Psychotherapy Research, 2015
Vol. 25, No. 1, 1–5, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2014.966348

INTRODUCTION

Fostering collaboration between researchers and clinicians through

building practice-oriented research: An introduction

LOUIS G. CASTONGUAY1 & J. CHRISTOPHER MURAN2

1
Department of Psychology, Penn State University, University Park, PA, USA & 2Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological
Studies, Adelphi University, Garden City, NY, USA
(Received 14 September 2014; revised 14 September 2014; accepted 14 September 2014)
Downloaded by [Selcuk Universitesi] at 14:08 08 January 2015

Abstract
This paper is an introduction to a special series that attempts to foster collaboration between clinicians and researchers by
presenting the experiences of 11 groups of contributors who have conducted practice-oriented research (POR) in various
countries and naturalistic settings. Each of these groups was asked to describe the context in which their collaborative
initiatives took place, as well as some of the studies conducted, obstacles faced, strategies employed to address these
challenges, and benefits earned. Authors were also invited to provide general recommendations to facilitate future POR. In
order to integrate the lessons learned so far, as well as to consolidate suggestions for future collaboration of clinicians,
researchers, and other stakeholders in the field of mental health, the series ends with a conclusion paper that identifies
convergences and particular characteristics that cut across the partnerships featured.

Keywords: practice-oriented research; practice-based evidence; practice-research network; scientific-practitioner model

It is well known that the connection between the
science and practice of psychotherapy is a tenuous
one, at best. Clinicians are not substantially or
primarily guided by empirical findings in their
clinical practice (Morrow-Bradley & Elliott, 1986;
Safran, Abreu, Ogilvie, & DeMaria, 2011; Stewart &
Chambless, 2007). At the same time, they increas-
ingly face pressure to implement “evidence-based
practice.” Not surprisingly, research is viewed by
many of them as being both irrelevant and alien to
their work (Castonguay, Locke, and Hayes, 2011).
Yet, many clinicians have chosen to go into mental
health graduate programs (e.g., clinical or counsel-
ing psychology) in part because they were interested
in doing research that could contribute to a better
understanding, if not an improvement of psychoso-
cial treatments. Sometime during or after graduate
school, the interest in and/or opportunity to conduct
research has, for many of them, all but faded away.
It has been argued that one way for clinicians to
reconnect with their early interest and training in
scientific investigations is by establishing an active
collaboration with researchers in conducting clinically
relevant research (Borkovec, Echemendia, Ragusea, &
Ruiz, 2001). Fortunately, different forms of partner-
ships have now emerged allowing clinicians to be
involved, in various degrees, in the design and imple-
mentation of research within their own clinical rou-
tine. This type of research, called “practice-oriented
research” (POR), can be viewed as complementary to
the more traditional psychotherapy studies, which are
frequently conducted in controlled settings and prim-
arily guided by the interests and expertise of academi-
cians. As recently reviewed, POR has led to a wide
variety of empirical investigations addressing numer-
ous aspects of the delivery, process, and impact
of psychotherapy (Castonguay, Barkham, Lutz, &
McAleavey, 2013). It is also clear, however, that the
number of practice-oriented studies pales in compar-
ison with the more traditional, or what could be
referred to as “evidence-based” investigations. In
order to provide a broad and robust empirical base

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Louis G. Castonguay, Department of Psychology, Penn State University,
354 Moore Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA. Email: lgc3@psu.edu

© 2014 Society for Psychotherapy Research

 2 L. G. Castonguay and J. C. Muran
of knowledge, both types of research should be
encouraged and recognized by trainers, practitioners,
researchers, and policy-makers (Barkham & Margison,
2007; Barkham, Stiles, Lambert, & Mellon-
Clark, 2010).
The goal of this special issue in Psychotherapy
Research is to help foster POR by presenting lessons
learned from existing clinicians and researchers part-
nerships. While the aforementioned review describes
what has been done so far, the aim of this series of
papers is to offer guidelines about what to do next
and, more importantly, how to develop and optimize
future collaborations between researchers and clin-
icians in conducting empirical investigations in clin-
ical practice. To achieve this aim, we invited clinicians
and/or researchers who have conducted and pub-
lished POR in a diversity of naturalistic settings, and
asked them to write a paper addressing the following
points:
Downloaded by [Selcuk Universitesi] at 14:08 08 January 2015
. The context or goals of their research program
in which they have developed a clinician–
researcher partnership;
. A brief description of some of the studies
conducted within this research program;
. The obstacles, challenges, difficulties, frustra-
tions encountered in developing and imple-
menting these studies;
. The strategies, successful and not, that they
have come up with to deal with challenges and
obstacles faced;
. The benefits (for researchers, clinicians, cli-
ents, administrators, the field of mental
health, and society) that came along with the
partnership they have built and the studies
that emerged from it; and
. Their recommendations for future studies
involving collaboration between clinicians and
researchers.
In addition to the present introduction, the series
includes 11 main papers and a conclusion. The first
paper addresses what is clearly a foundational issue
in the conduct and use of research in practice: the
implementation of outcome monitoring within rou-
tine clinical care. Integrating empirical findings from
three distinct instruments, Boswell, Kraus, Miller,
and Lambert (in press), highlight the difficulties and
advantages of collecting data on change, as well as
on strategies (i.e., giving feedback about client’s
progress and providing clinical tools to therapists)
to reduce deterioration in psychotherapy. In doing
so, the authors directly address “elephants in the
room”— factors that have been mostly ignored but
that have interfered with the collection and use
of research findings in clinical practice. Interest-
ingly, the authors also draw from non-psychotherapy
literatures to derive innovative recommendations for
the implementation of outcome monitoring. Also
based on the use of outcome measurements in day-
to-day practice, the next two papers focus on
research programs that have been conducted
within national health services. The first of these
(Holmqvist, Philips, & Barkham, in press) has
emerged from a wide body of practice-oriented
studies conducted in Sweden and the UK; all of
which were based on a shared standardized measure
of treatment outcome. The second derives from the
collaborative experience of researchers, therapists,
and administrators in the design and implementation
of two major naturalistic studies conducted in the
German health system (Strauss et al., in press).
Focusing on highly relevant clinical issues (such as
the effectiveness of theoretical orientations, services,
feedback procedures, and individual therapists; ther-
apy process; patterns and prediction of client
change; and health-related costs of psychotherapy),
these two papers provide guidelines for different
stakeholders (researchers, practitioners, health insur-
ance companies, health services institutions, and
governmental agencies) who might want to work
together in establishing a large research program
anchored in clinical care.
The next three papers are based on partnerships
that have been developed within more narrow
settings, which may nevertheless represent clinical
milieus that are familiar to a large number of
practitioners. With the goal of providing a context
where, optimally, the seamless integration of science
and practice should begin, Castonguay, Pincus, and
McAleavey (in press) describe the transformation of
a graduate training clinic into a practice research
network (PRN). Based on the collaboration of
students, faculty members, clinic staff and adminis-
trators, and private practitioners, the authors
describe an infrastructure that permits students to
simultaneously meet the clinical and empirical
requirements of their graduate degree— while advan-
cing knowledge that is directly related to their
academic courses, supervision, and the research
program they are pursuing in their particular labor-
atories. Koerner and Castonguay (in press) then
present two distinct partnerships that have been built
both within the context of private practice: One that
is led by a clinical researcher orchestrating several
studies with separate groups of clinicians, and the
other that is based on an active collaboration be‐
tween researchers and clinicians in all aspects of the
selection, design, implementation, and dissemina-
tion of studies conducted in outpatient clinical care.

Combining the clinical realities reflected in the previ-
ous two papers, Fernández-Álvarez, Gómez, and
García (in press) depict how an extensive research
program can be generated from a private organiza-
tion that provides both clinical services and training.
Although anchored in one center in Buenos Aires,
Argentina, the development of this research pro-
gram has involved the collaboration of clinicians,
clinical agencies, universities, researchers, and
reputed scholars across Argentina, as well as in
many countries in Latin America and around the
world. As a whole, these three collaborative initiatives
have led to studies that address interest and concerns
of clinicians in day-to-day practice, such as patterns
of change of highly severe clients; the use and/or
impact of specific interventions, treatments and
principles of change; the training of therapists in using
outcome monitoring and conducting single-case
experimental designs in their clinical routine; the
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integration of different theoretical approaches; help-
ful and hindering events; as well as the therapist’s
personal style.
The following four papers of this series share a
focus on the treatment of youth populations (chil-
dren, adolescents, and young adults). Garland and
Brookman-Frazee (in press) describe a partnership
between researchers and practitioners in community
centers, aimed at measuring the use of evidence-
based interventions in routine care, as well as
developing supervision tools to facilitate the imple-
mentation of these techniques with children with
disruptive behavioral problems and their families.
Based on literature from organizational management
and public health, the authors also present a con-
ceptual model that has guided the building and
functioning of their partnership, which can provide
a road map for others interested in developing a
similar collaboration. Within the context of a resid-
ential program for juvenile substance abusers, the
next paper provides a window on the experience of a
clinician who, in collaboration with the practitioners
and administrators of his center, first implemented
an outcome monitoring system to assess the clinical
needs of patients, and then organized the imple-
mentation (and measurement) of a treatment specif-
ically attuned to the unexpected needs identified
(Adelman, Castonguay, Kraus, & Zack, in press). In
a candid and open way, the paper also describes the
collaboration with academicians that was established
to further develop this clinically anchored research
program, with the goal of identifying barriers to
change (i.e., client’s history of poor attachment) and
potential factors to address them (i.e., corrective
experiences provided by a good therapeutic alli-
ance). The next paper by Szapocznik, Muir, Duff,
Psychotherapy Research 3
Schwartz, and Brown (in press) exemplifies how
the scientific-practitioner model can have a major
impact on the mental health system when it is based
on a full partnership between individuals with vari-
ous expertise and resources. It describes a major
research program on the efficacy, effectiveness, and
process of change of a brief form of family therapy
for adolescents of diverse ethnic backgrounds with
substance abuse and delinquency problems. Guided
by an implementation model that they developed
from their systemic theoretical framework, the
authors illustrate how the collaboration with differ-
ent stakeholders (clinical scientists, clinicians, super-
visors, members of treatment agencies, funders, and
referral sources) can facilitate the adoption, fidelity,
and sustainability of an empirically supported treat-
ment in community-based settings, as well as the
promotion of interventions that may have important
social impact (such as decrease of incarceration and
hospitalization). Another example of a partnership
that cuts across diverse worlds of stakeholders,
including clinical, administrative, academic, software
engineering, and funding agencies, is the Center for
Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH). As presented in
McAleavey, Lockard, Castonguay, Hayes, and
Locke’s (in press) paper, CCMH is a PRN infra-
structure that involves more than 200 university
counseling centers. Based on the aggregation of
several thousands of clients who fill out the same
measures of symptoms and demographics yearly, this
infrastructure has been built to collect data as part of
clinical routine and for the sake of describing,
informing, and improving day-to-day practice.
Allowing each center to contribute to a centralized
repository of data (used, for example, in studies of
minority and underserved populations, services util-
ization, and therapeutic change), as well as to
monitor outcome and gather information particular
to their own site, CCMH embodies a principle
that has been promoted for the future of POR:
work locally and collaborate globally (Castonguay
et al., 2013).
The last main paper of this series focuses on
what appears to be the first PRN devoted to
mental health, the American Psychiatric Institute of
Research and Education (West et al., in press). For
over two decades, this partnership of researchers and
practicing psychiatrists has investigated a wide range
of patient variables, therapist activities, and treat-
ment characteristics in routine practice (conducted
in a variety of public and private settings). With an
attention to a variety of clinical populations (such as
schizophrenia, depression, post-traumatic stress dis-
orders, substance abuse, and clients of diverse ethnic
backgrounds), studies were also conducted on the
 4 L. G. Castonguay and J. C. Muran
assessment and monitoring of symptoms, measure-
ment of treatment fidelity, and evaluation of quality
of care with a primary focus on conformity of routine
practice along evidence-based practice guidelines.
Established by the American Psychiatric Association,
this PRN provides a model for researchers attached
to professional organizations (such as the Society
for Psychotherapy Research) who are interested in
building a partnership with clinicians, other scientific
organizations, academic settings, governmental
agencies, advocacy groups, and health services sys-
tems— as well as in learning how to increase the
impact of research findings in terms of clinical
practice and health care policy.
Taken together, these 11 papers represent a breadth
of POR that spans over several countries in three
continents, various types of natural settings, a diversity
of clinical populations and treatment approaches, and
a myriad of research methodologies (including
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descriptive, qualitative, correlational, and experi-
mental investigations). While many of the research
programs have been led by full-time researchers,
others have been carried on primarily by practitioners.
A number of studies have also emerged from a full and
equal collaboration between academicians and clin-
icians, and several of them have involved the parti-
cipation of administrators, third-party payers, as well
as governmental and private funding. As an attempt to
integrate the wealth of lessons learned by these
collaborative initiatives, the concluding paper of this
series identifies convergences in terms of topics
investigated, challenges faced, coping strategies
used, benefits earned, and recommendations offered
(Castonguay, Youn, Xiao, Muran, & Barber, in
press). The concluding paper also highlights issues
that have been found in only a few of the particular
partnerships featured. Considering the variety of
infrastructures and experiences it reflects, we hope
that this issue of Psychotherapy Research will offer a
wide range of lessons to design and implement
scientifically rigorous and clinically relevant studies
in different naturalistic settings and, more impor-
tantly, to foster active collaborations between
researchers and clinicians in their shared ambition to
better understand and improve mental health care.
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