The research design that can best evaluate the presence of a cause and effect relationship between psychotherapy and improvement is a controlled experiment.

Question

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A controlled experiment involves randomly assigning participants to a treatment group and a control group and then measuring the effects of the treatment on the group that received it, while controlling for other variables that could contribute to the observed change. This design allows researchers to evaluate whether the psychotherapy caused the observed improvement, and not other factors that may have occurred simultaneously.

The Research Design That Can Best Evaluate the Presence of a Cause