Practical Approaches to Applied Research and Program Evaluation for Helping Professionals

Book excerpt: Practical Approaches to Applied Research and Program Evaluation for Helping Professionals is a comprehensive textbook that presents master’s-level counseling students with the skills and knowledge they need to successfully evaluate the effectiveness of mental health services and programs. Each chapter, aligned with 2016 Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) standards, guides counseling students through study design and evaluation fundamentals that will help them understand existing research and develop studies to best assess their own applied research questions. Readers will learn the basics of research concepts as applied to evaluative tasks, the art of matching evaluative methods to questions, specific considerations for practice-based evaluative tasks, and practical statistical options matched to practice-based tasks. Readers can also turn to the book’s companion website to access worksheets for practitioner and student planning exercises, spreadsheets with formulas for basic data analysis, a sample database, PowerPoint outlines , and discussion questions and activities aligned to each chapter.