Traditional research and psychotherapy practice.
Practitioners of psychotherapy hold different assumptions about the predictability and constancy of human actions than those required by the inferential logic employed in traditional research. Psychotherapy requires the use of judgment by therapists that goes beyond the direct application of generalized knowledge. Judgment is sensitive to the particular, contextual, and changing situation characteristic of therapy practice. Therapists decisions about what to do and say are informed by, but go beyond, that which is available in their knowledge bases. Therapists' knowledge bases include their own, as well as vicarious, experiences. Therapists can parse traditional research into descriptive and inferential components, and by treating the descriptive component as vicarious experiences, they can incorporate it into their knowledge base.
Polkinghorne
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Division of Counseling and Educational Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles 90089, USA. polkingh@mizar.usc.edu
D006801:Humans; D011364:Professional Practice; D011613:Psychotherapy; D012106:Research