Özet:

In the last ten years, the replication crisis, which has manifested itself and shaken the field of psychology profoundly, has led researchers in every subfield of psychology to reconsider research findings and general assumptions. Though late to this trend, clinical psychology researchers have started to participate in these discussions. Psychotherapy efficacy studies, carried out over many years, constitute a major experimental area of clinical psychology. Psychotherapy efficacy studies are conducted to evaluate the effects of psychological treatments on various mental disorders. The findings of the replication crisis indicate that randomized controlled trials, which are frequently used to examine the efficacy of psychotherapies and meta-analyses that help evaluate the results of randomized controlled trials, have several methodological problems and biases. Randomized controlled trials have problems and biases such as low sample size, allegiance bias, selective outcome reporting, strictness of inclusion or exclusion criteria, using wait-list as a control group, problems of randomization and blinding, exclusion of drop-out subjects from the analyses, and ignoring psychotherapists effects. The main methodological issues of meta-analyses are related to publication bias and the inclusion of low-quality studies in meta-analyses. Research over the years has demonstrated that psychotherapies are effective tools for treating various mental disorders. However, there are two critical points to note. First, the studies showing the efficacy of psychotherapies barely meet current scientific methodological standards. Second, the real-life effectiveness of psychotherapies may be lower than those found in clinical trials. This review article aims to increase awareness regarding replication crisis within the field of clinical psychology and strengthen the methodological approach of future studies by addressing the methodological problems of and suggesting solutions for psychotherapy efficacy studies/meta-analyses

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