Web-based Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for symptoms of anxiety and depression: Within-group effect size benchmarks as tools for clinical practice.

COVID-19 has highlighted the need for evidence-based behavioural health interventions that can be delivered remotely. This article provides within-group effect size benchmarks for randomised controlled trials of Internet-based Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for the treatment of adults with anxiety and depression. Effect sizes were calculated using the Glass approach, adjusted using Hedges then aggregated to produce separate benchmarks for measures of anxiety and depression.

A longitudinal study of the stress-buffering effect of social support on postpartum depression: a structural equation modeling approach.

Purpose: Postpartum depression (PPD) impacts about one out of eight new mothers. Research has demonstrated that social support is a protector of PPD. Nevertheless, there has been disagreement on how social support influences depression.

Can Family Caregivers Provide Life Review to Reduce Depression in Older Adults With Dementia?

Life review (LR) therapy has received considerable support as an effective treatment for depression among older adults. Researchers believe that providing LR does not require extensive training and can be done by family members who are not psychiatric professionals. If so, then training family caregivers to provide LR is a potential strategy for alleviating the shortage of resources for treating depression among the growing population of older adults experiencing depression.

Benchmarks for Evaluating Life Review and Reminiscence Therapy in Alleviating Depression among Older Adults.

The efficacy of reminiscence and life review (LR) therapy in alleviating depression among older adults is well established. However, providers in nonresearch settings might implement these interventions inadequately, and such settings rarely can evaluate their outcomes using control groups. Alternatively, evaluators in such settings can calculate a within-group effect size and then compare it with average within-group effect size benchmarks derived from the randomized clinical trials (RCTs) supporting the intervention's effectiveness.

A Practitioner-Friendly Empirical Way to Evaluate Practice.

Social work practitioners and the agencies that employ them have long been concerned with how best to evaluate whether the interventions that they adopt are being provided appropriately or with desired outcomes. The realities of practice in everyday service provision settings, however, make it difficult to use well-controlled research designs for evaluation purposes in such settings-especially designs involving the use of control groups. The purpose of this article is to provide practitioners in those settings with a new, feasible way to evaluate practice and yield approximate empirical findings that can inform practice decisions despite the absence of a control group.

Bridging the gap between research-supported interventions and everyday social work practice: a new approach.

This article describes a rationale for a focus on case studies that would provide a database of single-group pre-post mean effect sizes that could be analyzed to identify which service provision characteristics are associated with more desirable outcomes when interventions supported by randomized clinical trials are adapted in everyday practice settings. In addition, meta-analyses are proposed that would provide benchmarks that agency practitioners could compare with their mean effect size to inform their decisions about whether to continue, modify, or replace existing efforts to adopt or adapt a specific research-supported treatment. Social workers should be at the forefront of the recommended studies in light of the profession's emphasis on applied research in real-world settings and the prominence of social work practitioners in such settings.

Comparing social worker and non-social worker outcomes: a research review.

This article reports on a review of the literature comparing the outcomes of social workers with those of non-social workers. The review was commissioned by NASW's Texas Chapter to examine empirical evidence regarding the comparative effectiveness of social work to possibly support efforts to educate employers and the public about the value of social work. Because of the limited number of internally valid studies that have compared social workers and non-social workers on actual client outcomes, studies were also included if they examined practitioner variables that might be associated with client outcomes.

Social workers' orientations toward the evidence-based practice process: a comparison with psychologists and licensed marriage and family therapists.

This article describes the results from a large, cross-sectional survey of social workers, psychologists, and licensed marriage and family therapists (LMFTs) in Texas (N = 865) regarding their orientation toward and implementation of evidence-based practice (EBP). All social workers were recruited by e-mail using the state NASW Listserv (analysis was limited to master's level social workers), whereas 500 psychologists and LMFTs were randomly selected from the state licensing lists for a postal mail survey. The Evidence-Based Practice Process Assessment Scale-Short Version was used, along with 10 background/ demographic questions.

Bridges to life: evaluation of an in-prison restorative justice intervention.

Restorative justice initiatives have been identified as primarily, if not exclusively, useful as a "front-end" diversionary option reserved for non violent property crimes and minor assaults. In-prison restorative justice programs are rare and have not been examined for their impact on recidivism. Bridges to Life (BTL) is a voluntary, manualized, ecumenical faith-based restorative justice program offered to incarcerated offenders who are within nine months of their release.

Assessing the long-term effects of EMDR: results from an 18-month follow-up study with adult female survivors of CSA.

This 18-month follow-up study builds on the findings of a randomized experimental evaluation that found qualified support for the short-term effectiveness of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) in reducing trauma symptoms among adult female survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA). The current study provides preliminary evidence that the therapeutic benefits of EMDR for adult female survivors of CSA can be maintained over an 18-month period. Furthermore, there is some support for the suggestion that EMDR did so more efficiently and provided a greater sense of trauma resolution than did routine individual therapy.

Gender differences in dually-diagnosed clients receiving chemical dependency treatment.

This article considers gender differences among 97 clients with dual diagnoses of severe mental illness and chemical dependency (46 male and 51 female). Comparisons are made at the time of their admission to an inpatient chemical dependency treatment program and at follow-up in cases where data are available. Many of the findings at time of admission are consistent with the few studies that have compared men and women with co-occurring mental and substance use disorders.