Counseling Psychology

Groups the studies whose central finding concerns the effectiveness or comparative outcomes of psychotherapy and counseling as practiced, rather than the underlying theory of a specific clinical disorder. Belongs here: Smith and Glass's Psychotherapy Outcome Meta-Analysis, which statistically combined hundreds of individual outcome studies to establish psychotherapy's overall effectiveness and introduced meta-analysis as a research method. A study of a specific mental disorder's diagnosis or mechanism, rather than of counseling or therapy outcomes themselves, is filed under clinical psychology instead.