Clinician/Researcher Role

A clinician/researcher combines the best of both worlds. For example, Fisher et al. [1] suggest that a clinician’s referral appears to be most effective when the principal investigator is also a practicing clinician who has good relations with the referring clinicians and offers something in exchange. However, a long-standing reason for the lack of integration or uptake of new findings generated from efficacy-based studies has been the controversy between practitioners and researchers regarding the differences between efficacy and effectiveness research [2,3]. Efficacy research is about systematically evaluating treatments under controlled conditions in a clinical research context. The prominent research elements of efficacy studies, which contribute to their internal validity typically, include a control condition (s), random assignment, treatment manuals, and diagnostically homogenous groups. On the other hand, effectiveness research is about evaluating the applicability and feasibility of treatments in real-world settings in order to determine the generalizability of treatments with demonstrated efficacy.