Issues in the assessment of outcome in family therapy

This paper examines several issues in family therapy outcome research. These include the need to consider numerous population and treatment goals and values upon the research, the difficulties in defining and operationalizing family treatment, the choice between emphasizing integrity of treatment or randomness of sampling, the selection of measurement methods, the controls needed in research design, the importance of efficiency of treatment, and the special role of deterioration effects. Throughout, the need for a multivariate schema for conceptualizing this research and special attention to the role of values and assumptions in it are highlighted.