This study examines the impact of social class on the school-to-work (STW) transitions of young adults in working-class occupations. Using an exploratory, qualitative research methodology, interviews were conducted with 10 men and 10 women to examine the role of social class in the STW transition. All participants were working in low-skilled jobs and grouped into 2 cohorts based on their family's socioeconomic background: higher socioeconomic status (HSES) and lower socioeconomic status (LSES). The findings indicate that social class played an important role in the participants' STW transition. Individuals from the HSES cohort expressed greater interest in work as a source of personal satisfaction, higher levels of self-concept crystallization, greater access to external resources, and greater levels of career adaptability compared with their LSES counterparts. I was forced into this way of life. It's like I was forced to drop out of school and being in the position I am in now. (Participant #40

The logic of the randomized double-blind placebo control group design is presented, and problems with using the design in psychotherapy are discussed. Placebo effects are estimated by examining clinical trials in medicine and psychotherapy. In medicine, a recent meta-analysis of clinical trials with treatment, placebo, and no treatment arms was conducted (Hróbjartsson & Gøtzsche, 2001), and it was concluded that placebos have small or no effects. A re-analysis of those studies, presented here, shows that when disorders are amenable to placebos and the design is adequate to detect the effects, the placebo effect is robust and approaches the treatment effect. For psychological disorders, particularly depression, it has been shown that pill placebos are nearly as effective as active medications whereas psychotherapies are more effective than psychological placebos. However, it is shown that when properly designed, psychological placebos are as effective as accepted psychotherapies.

Evidence-based practice and empirically supported treatment movements are potent forces that affect the practice of psychology today and have the potential to mandate the types of treatments psychologists conduct. The histories of these movements reveal that certain aspects of therapy valued by psychologists have been ignored. It is shown that the evidence-based movements (a) overemphasize treatments and treatment differences and (b) ignore aspects of psychotherapy that have been shown to be related to outcome, such as variation among psychologists, the relationship, and other common factors. It is important that psychologists understand the development of these movements so that they can be critical consumers of research and can effectively influence the future course of events.

This article examines the 50 qualitative studies published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology (JCP) over a 15-year period in light of methodological principles advocated by qualitative theorists. The match between practices and principles is not high. In the modal investigation, coders (most of whom did not interact with or observe participants) worked from transcripts of a 60-min interview conducted in a setting convenient for the researcher. Researchers endorsed the need to bracket their own subjective experiences and used auditors to enhance reproducibility of findings. Trend analyses suggest that qualitative research in JCP has tended to drift further from qualitative principles over time. The authors consider the implications of these findings for the potential of qualitative methods to inform science and practice in counseling psychology.

The Random House College Dictionary (1984) defines insight as "an instance of apprehending the true nature of a thing, esp. through intuitive understanding." Two aspects of this definition may be altered to fit the context of psychotherapy as we conceptualize it. First, the truth of the understanding may be unimportant. Second, the dictionary definition of insight highlights the involvement of intuition; in psychotherapy, the Aha! phenomenon might be construed as being based on intuition. For our purposes, the manner by which the explanation is acquired, as well as the form and content of the explanation, are unimportant. It does not matter whether the understanding is invoked by a well-timed interpretation, stimulated by emotional experiencing, or explicitly provided by the therapist. What is important is that the patient attains an explanation and that the explanation is strategic to the process and outcome of psychotherapy (i.e., it is adaptive). Thus, we propose that insight involves obtaining a functional understanding of one's problem, complaint, or disorder through the process of psychotherapy and that insight is a beneficial common factor present in and critical to all psychotherapeutic orientations. Our definition and conceptualization builds on the pioneering work of Jerome Frank (e.g., Frank & Frank,