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

目标：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测量的治疗前和治疗后分数。在本文中，常见的假设受到挑战，即前后递减和递增的结果分数分别指示成功和失败的治疗。

方法：通过对常用结果指标（如症状清单-90-R、人际关系问题清单和一般健康问卷）的治疗前后评分进行定量分析，评估 29 项心理治疗的结果。 -12)，以及通过双方同意的定性研究。

结果：总体而言，观察到结果的定性和定量评估之间的中度到低度趋同。提供了六个案例的详细分析，其中结果测量的前后比较被证明具有误导性。

结论：得出的结论是，心理治疗结果研究可能受益于对个体治疗的奇异性和治疗结果现象的复杂性敏感的评估策略。此外，对结果措施有效性的经典心理测量评估可能会辅以系统性较低的评估，这些评估考虑了关于结果的任何可能的信息来源。