Dante Cicchetti and Stephen Hinshaw scan how collaborative efforts in the “Prevention and Intervention Sciences” (2002) can do better than the present conditions. Naming diagnoses, specifying developmental processes, discussing psychopathology is not what the article is about. The authors’ interest is bringing our attention to what we know about published studies. Not the studies themselves but the tests. And the not tests themselves but the making of them: how they come together; whose coordinating them; at what costs.
Test subjects are “children, adolescents, and families”, human beings we know and love; they could even be us, who happen to be “afflicted by mental and developmental disorders (Cicchetti & Hinshaw 2002, p. 668). Test subject are guided into studies, and the results to surface are guaranteed as the science of the investigator’s efforts. But this is fruitless science. Where are the “preventive strategies” (p. 667) we learn? What are the “intervention efforts” we use? Who are we testing? How? For the most part, as laymen, we can only guess, unless we’re unfamiliar with prevention research.
Prevention research is seeking out a disorder, and from what we learn about it: make sure it doesn’t happen again or in others. To cancel it is to disrupt: an Intervention. A collection of information and tactics regarding this would be called Research, and it is Research that we apply as a baseline. Explaining this would, of course, seem redundant, but the fact is that there is a lack of “clinical realities” (p. 668) in the research being done. This means, the disorders recorded are remaining as faceless facts on a page instead of being hints about troubled People. People who require help in order to resume a healthy lifestyle.
The studies we know on preventive and interceptive examinations are unworthy because the information is “all too often quite removed from both the clinical practice and clinical research” (p. 668). This means that there is a lot of slack in the field that isn’t being balanced or checked. In short “the barriers that exist are real” (p. 668). Though Cicchetti and Hinshaw state that there is progress, the barriers they are referring to are funds or lack of interest but the researchers themselves. The barriers allow trudging for the researcher, and grudging for the novice reader, as the information published is either irrelevant or out-of-date. Irrelevant information can be as simple as comparing unlike diagnoses, passing slight and offhand verdicts, or presenting studies that are so remote and exclusive that they disregard a wider scale of possibilities. The qualities of studies are being diminished by their credibility because the researcher is not widening his field of investigation. Comparing ages, ethnicities, gender, culture, and location is vital when it comes to narrating what is truly a disorder, what is truly a maladaptation (p. 668). It’s a “focus on vulnerability” (p. 670), the underlining factor that unities and engages why certain some develops they way she has. This tactic will relaunch what the “basic and applied efforts” (p. 668) of the common study are. And in doing so, it changes what is out-of-date. Change what is out-of-date and a potentially-bias reference becomes an active guide.
Fortunately, faith is placed in the random. A random trial of prevention-and-intervention science is considered “naturalistic and correlational” (p. 669) because it is unbiased. At best, the least moderated trial would provide the appropriate clinical results. This means research collaborates the uncommon with typical development, instead of vying over a select and organized few. It’s the appreciated “gold standard” (p. 669) because a researcher is not hand-picking maladaptive behavior, but encountering them without expectation. This offers a better spectrum to understand and appreciate what is regarded as typical, and what is approved of as the respectively uncommon maladaptation. Encountering developmental disorders in this manner is much more rewarding but it also raises the risk. This looser structure of chance places much more pressure on when preventive measures are possible, and whether the interceptive methods can be used.
Golden research helps everyone. How this is achieved is by “understanding of atypical development can inform the understanding of normal development, and vice versa” and most importantly, “as long as consideration is given to contextual variables and developmental principles in explanation of how development can go awry” (p. 668). Or more simply: we can agree what’s normal and what isn’t, based on unconditioned outcomes. The method of randomizing would actually require discipline. It will require a commitment from the researcher to understanding why what happens when. This is absolutely necessary as “gold” (p. 669) research will maturely challenge researchers and stimulate interest in the reader and those who were previous unenclosed.
The method of “Preventive and Intervention Science” is how, as a team, we can trim down maladaptive behavior. To achieve it is to widen our spectrum, deepen our perspective, and accept chance over basic and regulated trials. It’s the criticism that we apply in life and it should be no different in a profession used to guide in not only better ourselves but to tune the possibilities, actualities, and severities we share. To not keep an accurate and complex recording on the instances of mental and physiological disorders is not only repressive but a renunciation. It shouldn’t be possible to narrow a study to stale, mainstream possibilities. So far, we’ve fossilized the present. If we continue, we resume suffocating every breakthrough that could have happened much sooner and helped much more people than expected.
Citations
Cicchetti, Dante, and Stephen P. Hinshaw. (2002). Editorial: Prevention & Intervention Science: Contributions to developmental theory, 14 (667 -671).
