Psychology

Participants
 Adults and teenagers of various ages participated in this study.  Subjects in the study (1) had a drug or alcohol addiction, (2) had been treated in a clinic for the addiction, (3) had experienced some sort of outpatient treatment.

Materials
Articles about extended treatment were used to conduct the research.  These articles came from such sources as Medline, Psychinfo, databases, and in-print research journals.

Design and Procedure
Searches in Medline and Psychinfo were conducted under the search words extended treatment, extended outpatient treatment, extended inpatient or residential treatment, long treatment, continuing care, addiction management, and therapeutic community.  Also used to search was controlled trial or study and searches under various lengths of time.  Databases created for meta-analyses of alcohol, drug, and criminal justice were investigated and searches in treatment literature for intervention longer than six months were conducted.  Also, the table of contents of research journals such as (e,g.Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Addiction, Journal of Studies on Alcohol,  Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, Archives of General Psychiatry) were explored.

The experiment was trying to find the out the amount of alcohol and drug use which existed during in patient and out patient treatment in the studies used and the results of the studies.  The results considered from the articles were about the topics of treatment interventions, methods used to monitor the symptoms of the addiction, and new treatments which related to extended intervention.

Next, research from the articles was used to define key terms related to the topic of extended treatment.  A theoretical rational was created for the use of extended treatment with consideration of such related topics as possible designs of extended interventions, the role of self-help and self management, the implications of high treatment attrition rates and poor compliance, the role of medication, economic issues, and the next important steps in the design and evaluation of new extended treatments.