Measure Development

Measure development: Person-centred/Experiential Research Instruments

Overview

From a person-centred/experiential perspective, an essential research activity is to develop measures and instruments that reflect own theories of therapy. However, most standard measures used in psychotherapy outcome research are pathology-oriented, i.e., rooted in medical model conceptualizations of psychological problems, and designed to assess general level of client problem/distress or impairment of functioning. Important goals of person-centred/experiential therapies such as personal growth, authenticity, self-awareness and client agency are not directly assessed by these standard outcome measures. Because of a lack of adequate measures of client strengths and resources theoretically relevant to person-centred/experiential therapies, one of our projects has been to develop the Strathclyde Inventory , a therapy outcome measure based on Carl Rogers’s theory of the fully functioning person and psychological change. The Strathclyde Inventory has been shown to be a reliable and valid measure in a study with 399 participants and now we are planning to test the measure with a clinical population (see presentations below).

Building on the development of the Strathclyde Inventory, we are in the early stages of developing the ‘Therapeutic Relationship Scale’. This new measure aims to capture the client’s and therapist’s experience of the quality of their relationship, focusing particularly upon the person-centred core conditions of empathy, unconditional positive regard and congruence in the therapeutic relationship, and the experience of therapist nondirectivity. The Therapeutic Relationship Scale is currently being piloted in the Social Anxiety Project Research. Feedback on this pilot measure is welcome, as we are in the early stages of development. See the client version of the pilot measure here and the therapist version  here.

Moreover, a measure of relational depth is being developed in articulation with our research into this mode of relating. A preliminary questionnaire has been created and it is possible to take part and/or view this at www.surveymonkey.com/therapyquest. This questionnaire can be completed by clients and/or therapists. When enough participants have taken part, it is intended that the resultant data will be used to create a final questionnaire that is both valid and relatively short. It is hoped that such a measure will be used in conjunction with other inventories, such as outcome measures, in order to explore whether relational depth is predictive of a beneficial therapeutic outcome.

In addition, a variety of other measures are available through the Network for Research on Experiential Psychotherapies. These include process and outcome measures, and instruments for qualitative assessment of changes processes and significant events, with particular reference to Process-Experiential and Focusing-Oriented therapies.

Presentations

Current work

Potential research topics

Active researchers