Research is central to the mission of the New Horizons Family Counseling Center. Research projects conducted at the Center serve its clients and the field as a whole by advancing understanding and facilitating the development of more effective family counseling approaches. In addition, they provide a medium through which students can develop the research skills that they will need as future counselor educators.
Research at New Horizons has used both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to explore various elements of counselor behavior, counseling process, counselor supervision, internship experiences, and child temperament. Modern computer technology has enabled the collection of an ongoing and readily accessible base of pre-treatment and post-treatment clinical data from which a number of dissertations and published manuscripts have originated.
Research projects currently underway at New Horizons include an investigation into the utility of integrating Action Research principles into clinical service delivery, an investigation of the usefulness of the Global Assessment of Relational Functioning (GARF) instrument in clinical assessment and outcome evaluation, and a qualitative investigation of the affective experience of novice family counselors during their internship experience. Several more studies are planned for the coming year, and the potential for research at the Center is virtually unlimited.