Research Output
Practitioner Review: Therapist variability, patient-reported therapeutic alliance, and clinical outcomes in adolescents undergoing mental health treatment - a systematic review and meta-analysis
  Background: Previous meta-analyses have only found small correlations (r=0.10 to r=0.19) between therapeutic alliance and clinical outcomes in samples of adolescents receiving psychological therapy. Although study-level variables have been found to moderate this, little is known about the impact of therapist variability. The present meta-analysis aimed to address this gap by using patient-therapist ratio as a moderator variable.

Methods: Contrary to previous reviews of adolescent alliance, individual effect sizes were extracted using a pre-registered conceptual hierarchy. Controlling for treatment-level confounds, a random effects meta-analysis assessed the moderating effect of patient-therapist ratio on the alliance-outcome relationship in pre-defined single-predictor and multi-predictor meta-regressions.
Results: The alliance-outcome relationship was found to be larger than previously thought (k=28, N=2911, r=0.29, 95% Confidence Interval 0.21, 0.37; p

  • Type:

    Article

  • Date:

    06 July 2017

  • Publication Status:

    Published

  • DOI:

    10.1111/jcpp.12767

  • ISSN:

    0021-9630

  • Library of Congress:

    RJ101 Child Health. Child health services

  • Dewey Decimal Classification:

    616.8 Nervous & mental disorders

  • Funders:

    Edinburgh Napier Funded

Citation

Murphy, R., & Hutton, P. (2017). Practitioner Review: Therapist variability, patient-reported therapeutic alliance, and clinical outcomes in adolescents undergoing mental health treatment - a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 59(1), 5-19. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.12767

Authors

Keywords

Adolescent therapy, meta-analysis, therapist variability.

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    This is the peer reviewed version of the following article:Murphy, R. and Hutton, P. (2017), Practitioner Review: Therapist variability, patient-reported therapeutic alliance, and clinical outcomes in adolescents undergoing mental health treatment – a systematic review and meta-analysis. J Child Psychol Psychiatr. doi:10.1111/jcpp.12767, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.12767. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving

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