In exercising reasonable caution to preserve the integrity of counseling, counselors inhibit the use of research methods most likely to lead to improvements in counseling. The purposes of this paper are (a) to explore one possible solution to this problem, and (b) to describe a laboratory based counseling research program. (Author)

In spite of the potential which experimental research methods affords counselors in the development of effective counseling services, such methods are seldom used. After briefly reviewing the arguments against experimental research and their underlying beliefs, the author sets out: (1) to explore the implications of using the laboratory to conduct…