Abstract

Objective: To assess the outcome of psychotherapeutic treatments, psychotherapy researchers often compare pre- and post-treatment scores on self-report outcome measures. In this paper, the common assumption is challenged that pre-to-post decreasing and increasing outcome scores are indicative of successful and failed therapies, respectively.

Method: The outcome of 29 psychotherapeutic treatments was evaluated by means of quantitative analysis of pre- and post-treatment scores on commonly used outcome measures (such as the Symptom Checklist-90-R, the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems, and the General Health Questionnaire-12), as well as through consensual qualitative research.

Results: Overall, a moderate to low convergence between qualitative and quantitative evaluations of outcome was observed. Detailed analyses of six cases are presented in which pre-to-post comparisons of outcome measures proved misleading.

Conclusions: It is concluded that psychotherapy outcome research might benefit from assessment strategies that are sensitive to the singularities of individual treatments and to the complexity of the phenomenon of therapeutic outcome. Furthermore, classical psychometric evaluations of the validity of outcome measures might be supplemented with less-systematic evaluations that take any contingent source of information on outcome into account.

摘要

目的：为了评估心理治疗的结果，心理治疗研究人员经常比较自我报告结果指标上的治疗前后得分。在本文中，一个普遍的假设受到挑战，即事前减少或事后增加的结果分数分别指示成功和失败的疗法。

方法：通过定量分析治疗前和治疗后分数的常用结局指标（例如，症状清单-90-R，人际交往量表和一般健康问卷）对29种心理治疗方法的结局进行了评估-12），以及通过协商定性研究。

结果：总体上，观察到结果的定性和定量评估之间有中等到较低的收敛。提出了六个案例的详细分析，其中结果度量的前后比较被证明具有误导性。

结论：结论是，心理治疗结局研究可能会受益于对个体治疗的奇异性和治疗结局现象的复杂性敏感的评估策略。此外，对结果测量效度的经典心理计量学评估可以辅以较少系统的评估，这些评估应考虑到关于结果的任何或有信息来源。