Human services professionals face tremendous challenges today. Clients, government agencies, and other funders increasingly expect professionals to produce measurable and verifiable outcomes. The main goal with this textbook is to help students better understand the utility of research to human services. That is to say, the book presents research as a tool for practice, something that can be used to help professionals in their work with clients, designing programs and services, and advocating for policy changes. In addition to presenting research as a tool for practice, the book also emphasizes connections between human service research and practice, stressing that each plays important and complementary roles in addressing social and personal problems. This textbook is primarily an introduction to social research as it relates to the human services. There are two new main features to this edition. Each chapter opens with a Vignette describing a situation in which a human services professional is faced with a task or dilemma that can be addressed through research or by employing a research technique in practice. The second new major feature is the Practitioner Profile, included in most chapters. These Practitioner Profiles present actual human services professionals who are not professional researchers but nonetheless incorporate research methods into their practice. Similar to the Practitioner Profiles, several chapters also include one or more Research in Practice features designed to help students better understand applications of research methods and concepts and the overall research process. At the end of each chapter, there is a list and brief description of the Main Points of the chapter, which serves as a review of the major concepts covered. Following the Main Points is a list of Important Terms for Review. Following the Important Terms for Review are three sets of questions, critical thinking, evaluating competency, and self-assessment.

This book employs and transcends the customary methods of diagnosis and treatment by providing several unique assessment procedures, as well as many distinctive therapeutic recommendations. Major factors that have made brevity possible in psychotherapy are the learning-based, problem-focused, and solution-oriented approaches, and the evolution of sophisticated and effective techniques for biological assessment and intervention. Whereas many clinicians derided behavior therapists for their emphasis on being active, giving homework assignments, and maintaining specific foci, procedures of this kind have now become standard fare across a diverse range of brief therapies. Specific boundaries have been proposed to protect patients from exploitation and any form of harassment and discrimination, and to emphasize the significance of respect, integrity, confidentiality, and informed consent. In many circles these well-intentioned guidelines have reached a point of absurdity and are transformed into rigid straitjackets that force clinicians into a remote and cold posture. In addition to the psychotherapy literature, the author modernizes his eclectic and goal-oriented approach to psychotherapy. Using traditional acronym--BASIC I. D.--the author stresses the assessment of seven dimensions of a client’s personality: Behavior, affect, sensation, imagery, cognition, interpersonal relationships, and drugs/biology. In multimodal assessment, the BASIC I. D. serves as a template to remind people to examine each of the seven modalities and their interactive effects. The book demonstrates how brief multimodal therapy can be adapted and applied to specific disorders. When individual agendas, hidden or other, undermine a relationship, individual therapy is often essential before the couple can benefit from conjoint therapy. When distressed couples are relatively stable and are genuinely interested in achieving a harmonious relationship, salubrious outcomes can usually be achieved in six or seven sessions of “didactic instruction”.