Agreement on the concept of the ideal therapist as a function of experience

Fiedler ' showed that experienced therapists of different schools agreed more highly with each other than with non-experts of their own schools concerning the nature of the ideal psychotherapeutic relationship. However, Fiedler's concept of experience pertained only to time spent with patients in a therapeutic relationship or as an actual subject of therapy. He did not take into consideration the type of clinical sophistication and change in attitude which may result from academic exposure to therapeutic processes and to the theories behind them. His non-experts had already had some academic training and thus they were not completely unfamiliar with the theories, practices, etc. Perhaps the lack of large statistical differences between Fiedler's expert and non-expert groups was partly the result of a similarity in amount of academic training. In further criticism ^ ' ^^ of Fiedler's study, there were some rather important weaknesses in his Q-sort which was weighted with banalities and extreme statements {e.g., " . . . is hostile."). Sets of items were included with identical content but with different adverbs {e.g., always . . ., sometimes . . , never . . . ) so that the items fell rather easily into categories ranging from most to least characteristic. Such items tend to compel agreement among sorters. Fiedler did not indicate any pretesting of the Q sort with the aim of maximizing item variability and minimizing the average correlations between sorts, which Apfelbaum^^^ has demonstrated to be important. High item variability and low average correlation between sorts would seem to be important in studies involving "ideal" concepts because variability can be expected to be somewhat lessened already by social desirability and social stereotype factors. Thus, while this study and its hypothesis are based on Fiedler's investigation of the therapeutic relationship, an attempt has been made to improve the method by using a carefully constructed and pretested Q sort and by using groups differing in amount of academic training as well as amount of therapeutic experience. The hypothesis is: Experienced psychotherapists will agree more than less experienced therapists on the qualities of the ideal psychotherapist. Here the term experience includes exposure to academic training as well as the actual experience with patients.