Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Jean Mercer (talk | contribs) at 12:52, 12 July 2006 (→Page is growing nicely). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

This is my article and I am the holder of the copyright. When the article was previously printed I allowed printing of the article, but retained ownership of the copyright.

Arthur Becker-Weidman, Ph.D., Center For Family Development 716-810-0790 AWeidman@Concentric.net

The comment above relates to an earlier version of the article, which had been marked as a possible copyright infringement. It was published on another site, but the assertion seems genuine enough to me. During the review, User:AWeidman followed the procedure given for rewriting the article on a /Temp subpage. As that version seemed to me more in the style of a encyclopedia article, and was better referenced etc., I moved it in place over the original version, which remains available in the page history. --Michael Snow 22:49, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

The claim that DDP meets the criteria for the EBT designation is a very questionable one, as I recently pointed out in a letter to the editorial board of the Child and Adolescent Social Work journal, cc'd to Becker-Weidman. My comments on the nature of evidentiary bases, especially as they relate to Becker-Weidman's publication, will shortly be posted on www.childrenintherapy.org -- under the title "EBT or not EBT?" I would appreciate editing of this page to include any rebuttal to those remarks that Becker-Weidman may be able to provide. Proof by assertion is not acceptable evidence, and if Misplaced Pages permits simple assertions on controversial issues, it may as well declare itself a blog. Jean Mercer.

The material was published in a professional peer-reviewed journal. Child and Adolescent Social Work found the study valid, reliable, and as meeting criteria for evidence-based-treatment as described in the article. Your comments have not yet appeared in the journal. Will they be published or was you letter dismissed as irrelevant. The article demonstrates that Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy is an evidence based treatment and subsequent resarch that has also been published confirms that.

Please note that my comments were not written for publication, but as a letter to the editorial board, as I felt it would be desirable to allow the journal to handle the matter in a private way. I do notice that the article did not appear in the issue referenced in this article. Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal accepted the article; this is not an indication that they considered the material valid or reliable (and indeed i don't see what those adjectives have to do with a CCT study), or that they consider DDP to meet criteria for an evidentiary basis-- for example, meeting the TREND guidelines. As i am sure you know, I have commented elsewhere on this peer review issue. Not all journals have well-organized review procedures,and even when they do, mistakes can be made. You cannot segue from a journal's statement that it is peer-reviewed to the conclusion that any material published there automatically meets criteria for an evidentiary basis-- this is apples and oranges, even pineapples or kiwi fruit. In fact, DDP does not have a satisfactory basis of evidence for a number of reasons: 1)participants were self-selected, introducing confounding variables; no explanation was given for the failure of the comparison group to enter treatment, and no demographic comparison of the groups was presented; 2)there has been no independent replication of these findings; 3)researchers were apparently not blind to the treatment status of participants; 4)human subjects protection guidelines were not observed; 5)no specific description of treatment seems to be available, and the description given in the Wiki piece under consideration is at variance with the description in the "Dr. Art" book currently available on Becker-Weidman's web site; 6) the statistical analysis is problematic, substituting the easy but dangerous multiple-t approach to the ANOVA which should have been done here; 7) although the Wiki piece stresses the CBCL findings, the journal article (as it was posted on the web site) refers also to the use of the egregiously faulty RADQ checklist. If anyone would like to provide substantive counter-arguments to these points, as opposed to simply deleting my comments or mounting personal attacks, I would be very pleased to read them and to see them included in the article.Jean Mercer 15:52, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, they obvioulsy rejected your "letter" and chose not to publish it. The journal, as far as I can see is a professional peer-reviewed journal that found Dr. Becker-Weidman's article worthy of publication and as providing substantive and valuable material that would be of use to professionals. The article did describe that those in the control group came for evaluation only and the statistics clearly show that the two groups did not differ in a significant way on a broad range of demographic, clinical, and test score data. CBCL scores are valid and reliable. Overall, the claims you make are irrelevant as the journal's acceptance of the article suggests your "issues" with the article are minor and do not take away from the scientific validity and value of this study. RalphLender 17:54, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

No, what it suggests is that CASWJ is not particularly concerned with research design. Not all journals have the same concerns. But from the point of view of establishing an evidentiary basis, my questions need to be addressed. Volunteers are different from non-volunteers, that's well known. So, why did some people come for evaluation only, and others for evaluation plus treatment? What were the basic differences between the groups? Did they have to do with family needs-- did some of the parents not like the offered treatment-- were other treatments chosen instead? All of those questions are relevant to interpretation of the outcome, as are the points that always go unmentioned, the transparency issues, the use of the RADQ, and the choice of statistics... not to mention compliance with guidelines for protection of human subjects.Scott Lilienfeld has been telling us that clinicians are not educated to understand these issues, and I'm afraid he may be right.

Look, a lot of people have thought and written a great deal about establishing evidence to support the efficacy and safety of treatments. It's quite difficult to do a good CCT study. I don't demand that you randomize-- that can be almost impossible, especially in private practice. I don't even demand that you have a better design. But I do demand transparency in reporting, including appropriate statistical handling. By the way, it's really unconscionable to leave the incorrect reference information on this page and elsewhere, making it impossible for many readers to examine the paper for themselves. If you believe that there is really clear-cut evidence to support DDP, put it out there where readers can get at it, and explain why you think the design and analysis are acceptable.

Once again, the real issue is not who is King of the Attachment Therapists or Big Expert on Research Design. The question is about protection of children and families, especially highly vulnerable adoptive families. It is a blow against those people to claim that a treatment is effective without unimpeachable evidence.To convince them of what is not true is to persuade them to spend their scarce resources and get nothing in return. I don't know what your ethics code says about that, but mine disapproves. Jean Mercer 20:25, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

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Someone with an IP address from the Buffalo, NY, area seems to so much lack a secure base that s/he can't tolerate any discussion. So s/he deletes things (like the paragraph before last) in an Orwellian attempt to rewrite history. So I've put back the paragraph and remind that s/he can't rewrite the Misplaced Pages history. For the sake of his/her rapidly declining reputation, s/he should try explaining or justifying his/her editing behavior. 206.81.65.234 21:50, 24 April 2006 (UTC) A friend (not an alter ego) of Jean Mercer and of the truth

Page is growing nicely

This page is growing well. The evidence base for this form of treatment is rapidly expanding. Forgot to sign in RalphLender 20:41, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

I've read some very interesting material about this treatment and find it very compelling RalphLender 20:41, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

I have done some editng that I think reflects reality a bit better than the previous version. However, I notice a great deal of disorganization and repetition in the article. Are the original study and the follow-up really as identical as is presented here? One does think of Sir Cyril Burtt. Jean Mercer 22:13, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

I added a citation and cleaned up some of the material to be more neutral and correct DPeterson 00:34, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps, if for "neutral" one reads "positive." however, I see you left the apostrophes I inserted-- that's a step in the right direction. My questions from 11 july still need to be answered, and the article is not well organized. I would propose the following parts: definition; description of treatment; theoretical background; evidentiary basis. Every point currently in the article could be placed in one of these categories. In the description and the theoretical sections, the material needs to be more concisely descriptive; presently there are a lot of words, but the naive reader would not know much after wading through them. The descriptive section also needs to clarify the work done with parents-- the "Dr. Art" book on Becker-Weidman's web site does not suggest much about this except that parents are apparently advised to bottle-feed school-age children. In the section about theory, I would think a reference to Stern would be a propos. Also, because of Hughes' remarks in his 1997 (I think) book, it would seem that Foster Cline's contribution should be acknowledged-- Hughes has never given a clear statement about his current view on this and why it has altered, if it has. Although the concept of attachment is shared with Bowlby, much of the background lies elsewhere; Bowlby never suggested that early stages of attachment could be re-worked by imitating the normal events of those periods. This is an important point to deal with, because the APSAC task force report specifically rejected the use of age regression techniques (see the november issue of Child Maltreatment for a LTE proposing a definition of age regression.)To claim compliance with APSAC, proponents of DDP need to offer a rationale for their use of bottle-feeding and similar practices.Jean Mercer 12:52, 12 July 2006 (UTC)