Читать книгу Practitioner's Guide to Using Research for Evidence-Informed Practice - Allen Rubin - Страница 42

As discussed earlier in this and the preceding chapter, a common misinterpretation of EIP is that you should automatically select and implement the intervention that is supported by the best research evidence, regardless of your practice expertise, your knowledge of idiosyncratic client circumstances and preferences, and your own practice context. No matter how scientifically rigorous a study might be and no matter how dramatic its findings might be in supporting a particular intervention, there always will be some clients for whom the intervention is ineffective or inapplicable. When studies declare a particular intervention a “success,” this is most often determined by group-level statistics. In other words, the group of clients who received the successful intervention had better outcomes, on average, than those who did not receive the intervention. This doesn't give us much information about how any given individual might have responded to the intervention. In practice, we are interested in successfully treating each and every client, not just the average.

Moreover, we often don't know why some clients don't benefit from our most effective interventions. Suppose an innovative dropout prevention program is initiated in one high school, and 100 high-risk students participate in it. Suppose a comparable high school provides routine counseling services to a similar group of 100 high-risk students. Finally, suppose only 20 (20%) of the recipients of the innovative program drop out, as compared to 40 (40%) of the recipients of routine counseling. By cutting the dropout rate in half, the innovative program would be deemed very effective. Yet it failed to prevent 20 dropouts.