Premium
THE IMPLICATIONS OF CLIENT SATISFACTION FEEDBACK FOR BEGINNING FAMILY THERAPISTS: BACK TO THE BASICS
Author(s) -
Laszloffy Tracey A.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
journal of marital and family therapy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.868
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1752-0606
pISSN - 0194-472X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1752-0606.2000.tb00308.x
Subject(s) - citation , family therapy , psychology , library science , computer science , psychotherapist
Several family therapy scholars (Lebow & Gurman, 1995; Pinsof & Wynne, 1995; White, Scott, & Russell, 1997) have emphasized the need for further research to evaluate the relationship between the specific types of skills beginning family therapists utilize in therapy and therapeutic outcome. The issue of how researchers endeavor to make such evaluations also is of prime importance. Most (if not all) of what is written and discussed about therapy is based upon the therapist’s rather than the client’s experience (Garfield, 1978; Gurman, 1977; Kantor & Andreozzi, 1985; Kruger, 1985). When the client’s experience of therapy is discussed, it is from the impression of therapists, researchers, and theoreticians rather than of the clients themselves (Kuehl, Newfield, & Joanning, 1990). The problem of ignoring or minimizing clients’ perspectives in outcome research was highlighted by Stolk and Perlesz (1990), who utilized clients’ ratings of their satisfaction with therapy to evaluate the effectiveness of a family therapy training curriculum. They found that client satisfaction was lower among those clients of therapists who had 2 years of training versus those of therapists without any training. “Although trainees improved on trainerand self-rated skill measures over the course of training, these changes were not paralleled by families’ increased satisfaction with therapy” (Stolk & Perlesz, 1990, p. 56). This perceptual incongruity points toward the importance of incorporating client feedback into outcome research, a position supported by several scholars in recent years (O’Connor, Meakes, Pickering, & Schuman, 1997; Sells, Smith, & Moon, 1996; Shilts, Rambo, & Hernandez, 1997). This study challenged the historical marginalizatiodexclusion of clients’ perspectives from outcome research by relying solely on client-satisfaction ratings of therapy to assess outcome and select the sample. The sample consisted of cases where clients had rated the outcome of therapy as either “extremely satisfying” or “extremely dissatisfying.” After selecting the sample, client and therapist feedback from both groups of cases were analyzed in terms of what was considered good and not good about the therapy experience, including how the client-therapist relationship was perceived. The goal was to identify themes linked to the divergent outcomes.