Community versus Clinical Cognitive-Behavioral Intervention in Young-Adult Spanish Population with Generalized Social Phobia

The study investigates how to improve the results reported by the reviews on the effects of clinical interventions in adults with Generalized social phobia. The sample was composed of 91 participants (median age = 19.90 years, SD = 1.05) randomly assigned to three experimental conditions. The evaluations were conducted before and after treatment in all three groups and at 6-, 12-, and 24-month follow-up for the treatment groups. The results show (a) the effectiveness of the cognitive-behavioral strategy of detection and intervention, in a community context, versus clinical intervention both for the short and medium term; and (b) a significant improvement over the percentages of dropouts and of rates of complete recovery from the disorder. These findings allow us to conclude that the cognitive-behavioral strategy of detection and intervention, in a community context is shown to be a complementary intervention to the conventional and with high efficiency ratios.