Expert psychotherapists' use of four common factors in psychotherapy

Date

12/31/2015

Authors

Erwin, Kyle

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Abstract

A four-person research team used observation and structured qualitative analysis to examine and describe how five expert psychotherapists manifest four common factors central to psychotherapy outcomes. These factors fell into four domains (1) Therapy Alliance, (2) Enhancing Motivation, (3) Positive Expectation, and (4) Feedback. Five video streams of expert psychotherapists engaged in real psychotherapy sessions were directly examined by the four-person research team, made up of a doctoral candidate, two practicing psychotherapists, and a practicing professor of counseling psychology. Using a modified version of consensual qualitative research, the research team captured and classified the essence of verbal interventions by expert psychotherapists as they enacted the four common factors examined in this study. The research team coded almost 850 interventions into the four proposed common factor domains. Of the coded interventions, the research team coded almost 60% of the interventions in the domain of Therapy Alliance. The research team coded the remaining interventions into the domains of Positive Expectation (19.67), Enhancing Motivation (19.55%), and Feedback (2.26%). To provide greater descriptive information of experts’ enactments of interventions in the four common factor domains, the research team identified 7 major categories and 37 simple categories and subcategories, each of which is discussed in detail in the results and discussion section of the work. Finally, I discuss the potential implications of the research findings on training, research, and clinical practice.

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Keywords

Psychology, Common factors, Consensual qualitative research, Expert psychotherapist, Expertise, Counseling psychology

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