Rewiring efficacy studies to increase their relevance to routine practice

Current efficacy literature relies heavily on the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) as the gold standard patient self-report measure. In contrast, the evaluation of psychological therapies in routine practice relies heavily on the CORE-OM. Although the two measures are conceptually distinct, they have been shown to be highly correlated. This suggests the possibility of replacing one measure with the other - a procedure we refer to as rewiring - in service of making the results of efficacy studies using the BDI have greater relevance of practitioners who routinely use the CORE-OM. We tested this proposition using transformation tables (Leach et al., in press) to convert BDI-I scores into CORE-OM scores and reran the analysis of a major efficacy study of depression - the Second Sheffield Psychotherapy Project (Shapiro et al., 1994). Results showed a near perfect replication of the original results and examples of benchmarks concerning the overall effects of treatment as well as differences between treatments are provided against which outcomes in routine practice can be contrasted. The implications for bridging efficacy and effectiveness research are discussed.