Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada.
Psychother Res. 2009 Nov;19(6):677-86. doi: 10.1080/10503300902926554.
The field of psychology, as with many other disciplines, has been increasingly interested in being able to measure the effectiveness of behavioral interventions. This trend has led to a number of different approaches for measuring clinical significance, each addressing a slightly different aspect of the clinical outcome. Recently, clinical psychologists (and clients) have supported the contention that one of the most important therapeutic questions is whether clients are functioning equivalently to normal controls following an intervention. To address this question, Kendall, Marrs-Garcia, Nath, and Sheldrick (1999) presented an approach to measuring clinical significance that utilizes tests of equivalence. The present study clarifies the nature of the hypotheses being conducted in measuring clinical significance with tests of equivalence and extends the approach by incorporating recent advances in equivalence testing. A revised approach for evaluating clinical significance via equivalence testing is proposed, and an empirical example demonstrating this approach is provided.
心理学领域与许多其他学科一样，越来越关注能够衡量行为干预的有效性。这种趋势导致了许多不同的方法来衡量临床意义，每种方法都针对临床结果的一个略微不同的方面。最近，临床心理学家（和客户）支持这样一种观点，即最重要的治疗问题之一是客户在干预后是否与正常对照组一样正常运作。为了解决这个问题，Kendall、Marrs-Garcia、Nath 和 Sheldrick（1999）提出了一种利用等效性检验来衡量临床意义的方法。本研究澄清了使用等效性检验衡量临床意义时所进行的假设的性质，并通过纳入等效性检验的最新进展扩展了该方法。提出了一种通过等效性检验评估临床意义的修订方法，并提供了一个实证示例来说明该方法。
