Research into evidence-based psychological interventions needs a stronger focus on replicability

Abstract

It is a precondition for evidence-based practice that research is replicable in a wide variety of clinical settings. Current standards for identifying evidence-based psychological interventions and making recommendations for clinical practice in clinical guidelines include criteria that are relevant for replicability, but a better understanding as well refined definitions of replicability are needed enabling empirical research on this topic. Recent advances on this issue were made in the wider field of psychology and in other disciplines, which offers the opportunity to define and potentially increase replicability also in research on psychological interventions. This article proposes a research strategy for assessing, understanding, and improving replicability in research on psychological interventions. First, we establish a replication taxonomy ranging from direct to conceptual replication adapted to the field of research on clinical interventions, propose study characteristics that increase the trustworthiness of results, and define statistical criteria for successful replication with respect to the quantitative outcomes of the original and replication studies. Second, we propose how to establish such standards for future research, i.e., in order to design future replication studies for psychological interventions as well as to apply them when investigating which factors are causing the (non-)replicability of findings in the current literature.