The customer approach to beginning psychotherapy : its effects on patient attitude and treatment outcome
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1978
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Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to assess the relative effects of the Traditional and Customer approaches to the initial individual psychotherapy session. Specifically, the study sought to measure differences in patient attitudes toward the first session, patient perception of the therapist and the therapy relationship, differences in the expectancy reality discrepancy (discrepant therapist and patient expectations of the therapy process), symptom reduction, and number of treatment sessions for the two treatment approaches. All outcome measures were for low and high pathology levels. Two groups of forty patients each received, respectively, the Traditional and Customer approaches to the initial therapy session. Immediately following the first session, both patient and therapist recorded their expectations of the therapy process. The patient also recorded his/her perception of the first session and of the therapy relationship and the therapist. The therapist rated the patient's symptom pathology level at both the beginning and the end of therapy. It was found that the use of the Customer Approach to beginning treatment resulted in a significant increase in the number of treatment sessions attended by the patient; that was especially true for high pathology patients. Symptom reduction was found to relate significantly to initial pathology level. It appeared to have little relation to the beginning treatment approach. The expectancy reality discrepancy, using the Customer Approach, was significantly less for two particular treatment issues: (1) that psychotherapy is stressful, and (2) patients often do not feel good after individual therapy sessions. It appeared that more patients were not expecting the stress involved in therapy. It also appeared that those uninformed patients were more likely to terminate treatment prematurely than their informed counterparts. The relationship between number of treatment sessions and symptom reduction was examined. It was found to be nonsignificant...
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Major educational psychology