The ghost in the machine: identifying mediators of intervention effectiveness.

摘要

Conducting well-designed intervention studies that produce clinically significant improvements is central to practice disciplines. However, a frequent criticism of intervention research studies is that although they reveal causal associations between interventions and outcomes, they do not explain them (Bullock, Green, & Ha, 2010). When an intervention "works," what exactly is taking place within the patient or research participant to produce the observed results?