Design and analysis issues in the cross-cultural evaluation of psychotherapies

Psychotherapies and cultures cannot be made experimentally independent because important input, process, and outcome variables essentially involve participants' meanings, emics, which are not naturally invariant across cultures. Factor analysis can be helpful in describing the analogues of a specific psychotherapy in several cultures once relevant emic variables have been developed for each culture. The special problems of cross-cultural research complicate the usual problems of psychotherapy research, those of defining outcome and specific therapies and of measuring the response function of outcome to the various amounts of the therapy. However, the special problems of cross-cultural research, of meaning variation, also exist in intracultural psychotherapy research, though they have received little notice.