Gent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Psychother Res. 2021 Sep;31(7):882-894. doi: 10.1080/10503307.2020.1865584. Epub 2021 Feb 4.
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. 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. 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. 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.
为了评估心理治疗的效果，心理治疗研究人员通常会比较自我报告的治疗前后的结果测量分数。在本文中，我们挑战了一个常见的假设，即治疗前后分数的下降和上升分别表示治疗成功和失败。通过对常用的结果测量工具（如症状清单-90-R、人际关系问题清单和一般健康问卷-12）的治疗前后分数进行定量分析，以及通过共识定性研究，评估了 29 种心理治疗方法的结果。总体而言，定性和定量评估结果之间存在中等至低度的一致性。通过对六个案例的详细分析，我们发现对结果的测量的前后比较具有误导性。因此，心理治疗效果研究可能受益于评估策略，这些策略对个体治疗的特殊性和治疗效果的复杂性敏感，并对结果的任何偶然信息进行考虑。此外，对结果测量的经典心理计量学评估可能会得到补充，包括考虑到任何偶然信息的评估。
