PSYCHOTHERAPY ENGAGERS VERSUS NON-ENGAGERS
PSYCHOTHERAPY ENGAGERS VERSUS NON-ENGAGERS
PSYCHOTHERAPY ENGAGERS VERSUS NON-ENGAGERS
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engagement, and f) a definition of ‘engager’ in which clients must have attended at least<br />
8 sessions of therapy (indicating greater “buy-in” than if they attended just one<br />
subsequent session after the intake). The most widely used content analysis system in<br />
counseling psychology research (Hill, Nutt, & Jackson, 1994), the Helping Skills System<br />
(HSS; Hill, 2009), was used in the present study to classify helping skills categories.<br />
Since minimal empirical evidence exists on the study of helping skills and<br />
engagement, I pose research questions rather than hypotheses on the relationship between<br />
helping skills and engagement. Originally, I proposed two research questions for the<br />
present study: 1) Do therapists use different proportions of skills in intake sessions with<br />
clients who continue versus those who drop out?, and 2) Does the proportion of therapist<br />
skills change over thirds of intake sessions for dropouts compared to continuers?<br />
However, to be more descriptive of the data, I accordingly re-formatted the original<br />
research questions into nine research questions so that each skill occurring at least 1% of<br />
the time had its own research question. In addition, to be more precise in my<br />
terminology, I use the terms ‘engager,’ and ‘non-engager,’ instead of ‘dropouts’ and<br />
‘continuers.’<br />
These nine research questions are presented and briefly discussed below.<br />
Research Question 1: Do proportions of therapist approval-reassurance differ across<br />
time (1 st , 2 nd , and 3 rd thirds of intake sessions) and condition (engager versus non-<br />
engager)?<br />
Hill (1978) found that approval-reassurance was on average used 5 to 6% for each<br />
third of the intake; Hill found no difference in the use of approval reassurance across<br />
thirds of the intake (see Table 1 in Chapter 2). Lonborg et al. (1991) found that average<br />
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