Attitudes towards what is important in psychotherapy. : Similarities between clients and therapists before and after treatment and its relation to outcome

Sammanfattning

Background: Clients and therapists enter psychotherapy with differing attitudes about what is important in psychotherapy. It has been suggested as a key component in psychotherapy that therapists and clients come to an agreement on the nature of the problem and how to treat it. Drawing from several social psychological theories we hypothesis that clients attitude changes during therapy to become more like their therapist. Little research on attitude change during therapy exists and what does exist do not compare it in relation to the therapist's attitudes. Metod: We used survey data from 53 Swedish therapists and 171 of their clients. The clients answered the VEP-Q-C questionnaire pre and post therapy to see if client attitudes became more similar to their therapists during psychotherapy and how this correlated with treatment outcome. We also examined how an initial discrepancy between client attitudes and what they receive during therapy impact outcome and how previous therapy impacted the client's change in attitudes. Results: Contrary to our hypothesis there was no significant alignment between clients and therapist attitudes. Treatment outcome did not corelate with alignment in attitude change. There was no correlation between the difference between initial client attitudes and what they reported receiving and treatment outcome and previous therapy showed no effect on attitude change. This suggests that client's attitudes about what’s important in psychotherapy doesn't align themselves during therapy and that the alignment isn't an important part of the therapeutic process. Further study is needed to ascertain the validity of these results.