Research & Professional Development 4 - How to Conduct Research in Your Clinical Practice Using The Progress Monitoring Data You Collect to Guide Your Clinical Work

Cognitive-behavior therapists strive to provide evidence-based care. And many of us are trained as scientists and encouraged to adopt professional roles as scientist-practitioners. One way to do all these things as practitioners is to collect data to monitor the progress of each our patients in treatment and use those data to make a research contribution. Data clinicians collect to monitor their patients’ progress and strengthen their clinical work have huge potential to contribute to the scientific literature, as questions that clinicians confront daily and collect data to answer include important questions about the nature of psychopathology and of the change process in treatment that are important to the field. Dr. Persons will share nitty-gritty details of strategies she has learned to collect progress monitoring data for joint clinical and research purposes, to use the data to create a research database, to address ethical issues, to use the database to carry out empirical research studies, and to write up and publish the studies to make a contribution to the scientific literature.

Outline:
Why conduct research as a practitioner?
Collecting data to monitor your patients’ progress in treatment
What to monitor
When to monitor
How to monitor
Handling noncompliance
Using the data to contribute to research
Building a research database using your progress monitoring data
Identifying a good research question
Obtaining informed consent and HIPAA authorization for use of the data in research
Obtaining ethical review of the research
Obtaining help from collaborators and assistants
Writing up your results for publication