https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642537.2021.1923051
Analysis of single cases represents an essential strategy for developing our understanding of paradoxical outcome and illusory mental health. Based on findings from both practice-based and randomized controlled outcome studies, 35-40% of clients fail to improve over the course of psychotherapy.We examined the prevalence of failure cases in the Single Case Archive, a database that includes more than 3000 psychotherapy case studies from a variety of ISI-ranked journals. We found that only 4% of these studies describe any form of failure in treatment. Thematic analysis of the titles and abstracts of failure case studies revealed that the majority did not focus on investigating the nature or meaning of failure but were primarily interested in other theoretical and practical matters. We propose a number of explanations for this apparent publication bias in case study research and discuss implications for further research.
