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Telephone and online counselling for young people: A naturalistic comparison of session outcome, session impact and therapeutic alliance
Author(s) -
King Robert,
Bambling Matthew,
Reid Wendy,
Thomas Ian
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
counselling and psychotherapy research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.38
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1746-1405
pISSN - 1473-3145
DOI - 10.1080/14733140600874084
Subject(s) - session (web analytics) , alliance , telephone counseling , naturalistic observation , psychology , telephone interview , medicine , clinical psychology , medical education , psychiatry , social psychology , computer science , social science , sociology , world wide web , political science , law , intervention (counseling)
Kids Help Line is a national service providing free telephone counselling and online counselling to young people in Australia. This study used a naturalistic design and standardized measures to compare outcomes, session impact and therapeutic alliance for samples of 100 young people receiving a single session of telephone counselling and 86 young people receiving a single session of online counselling, provided by Kids Help Line. Results suggested that telephone counselling is associated with better counselling outcomes, higher session impact and stronger counselling alliance when compared with online counselling. The limitations imposed by a naturalistic design require caution in interpretation of the results. However, the pattern of results suggests that there are differences in effectiveness between telephone and online counselling. The most likely explanation is the greater communication efficiency of telephone counselling, which enables more counselling work to be undertaken in the time available. Implications for further development of online counselling are discussed.