What about the family in family therapy research?*

Abstract

Family therapists are frequently criticised for not publishing any substantiation of the effectiveness of their therapeutic interventions. This paper discusses why clinicians do not evaluate their work through examining current recommendations for family therapy evaluation, and the effects of these recommendations on the family under study. We provide some criteria specific to the family which will assist clinicians in selecting measurement instruments to evaluate family therapy. These relate to ethics, parsimony and design features of the study. The complexity of family therapy evaluation must be addressed if more clinicians are to do evaluation.