Description
We live in a measurement culture in which we are told that everything can be measured including the human experience. The consequence of this culture for the counselling world are rules about which clients have ‘good outcomes’ (i.e. change) and which do not. These rules have profound implications for clients, counsellors and counselling services.But what if our culture has got it wrong? What if the typical approach to outcome measurement cannot be relied upon to represent the change that clients experience during the counselling process?
In this presentation, we will look at what happened in four cases of person-centred therapy that took place in the Strathclyde Counselling and Psychotherapy Research Clinic. According to the typical rules for interpreting scores collected on outcome instruments (i.e. the difference between pre- and post-therapy scores) applied in practice settings, these cases are examples of ‘no change’. We used the Hermeneutic Single Case Efficacy Design method to investigate each case then synthesised our findings from all four cases. This enabled us to explore the clients’ experiences in greater detail and depth. It also allowed us to compare our findings across the four cases and also with a previous study that looked at the experiences of eight clients from the same dataset who were designated as having either good or poor outcomes according to their scores.
We learned that the image of ‘no change’ created by their outcome scores was very different to the therapeutic experiences of these clients. I will outline potential explanations for this difference, challenging some of the assumptions that underpin the measurement culture, and encouraging a renewed appreciation for the complexity of change within the counselling process.
| Period | 21 May 2025 |
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| Held at | Centre for Research in Human Flourishing, School of Education, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom |
| Degree of Recognition | International |