The Systematic Review as an Empirical Approach to Improving CBT Supervision

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has developed from a scientific tradition of prizing empirically-supported treatments and adhering carefully to techniques with a strong evidence-base. For instance, over 325 extant studies have supported the use of CBT with a range of populations and disorders (Butler, Chapman, Forman, & Beck, 2006). Unfortunately, the same scientific tradition has not been applied to developing our knowledge base and practice in CBT supervision. Current accounts of competent CBT supervision rely on experts' narrative statements. In order to develop an empirically-based model to support improvements in CBT supervision practice, we systematically review the clinical supervision literature, identifying a sample of 24 studies in which clinical supervision has been manipulated successfully We compare these empirically-supported findings with the current accounts of CBT supervision, and we propose a number of systematic methods for improving CBT supervision, taking account of other evidence-based summaries of competent supervision.