FAMILY FUNCTIONING

Family Therapy through Personal Application

Executive Summary

This paper has described the research on family functioning and the key elements of the program (approach, language, and process) that are helpful in solving the issues related to the family and relationships. Dissemination of empirically supported treatments is one of the greatest challenges facing family treatment researchers. The process of exporting empirically validated treatments to real-world clinical settings has proven far more complicated than anticipated. In case of family therapy treatment, the main criticism of the outcome in research has been the lack of generalization to everyday practice. Sampling problems in many studies may underlie the difficulties in making generalizations - the best research in the field has been conducted in populations who are most likely to respond to interventions, such as motivated, white, educated, middle-class families. It has yet to be investigated how the SOFT and different other models can be adapted to the conditions of other treatment settings. The importance of factors such as the level of specialization of the team members and the possibility of a multidisciplinary approach (within a team of experts in pediatrics, nursing, nutrition, physical activity, and family therapy) needs to be further explored.

Family Therapy through Personal Application

Introduction

This paper aims to enlighten the contemporary method of treatment known as family therapy. The purpose of this paper is to explore the process called family therapy. In addition, this paper focuses to implement the directives and methodologies suggested by this therapy for personal application. This paper analyzes the treatment tactics used by family therapy and uses them to find their effect on the personal case scenario. Family Therapy has emerged as a preferred treatment approach for adolescent behavior problems (Sexton & Alexander, 2002). Despite positive treatment outcomes, there is still a gap between research and practice and an incomplete understanding of how to successfully disseminate evidence-based family programs into every day clinical practice. Many researchers have attributed adolescent problem behaviors to a number of risk factors including individual, family, peer, school, and neighborhood factors (e.g., Gerard & Buehler, 2004); therefore treatment approaches should be broadened to include the important relational contexts and salient subsystems in which adolescents' problematic behaviors tend to develop and are expressed (Kazdin & Weisz, 2003).

A major limitation, however, of current family and evidence-based programs is the ability to successfully transport them into community-based practice settings, creating a significant gap between evidence-based researches developed in the lab and the current applied practice settings within our communities (Mendel, Meredith, Schoenbaum, Sherbourne, & Wells, 2008). Translational research involves the time it takes to disseminate findings derived from basic science and adapting it for an applied practice setting, for example, how specific components of a treatment intervention affect changes in symptoms, the number of times a specific therapy component should be used in therapy, how to guard against implementation of harmful treatment, and attention to specific samples that represent the population being studied (Tashiro & Mortensen, 2006). For the purpose of this mixed-method study, translational research was used to ...