Investigating patterns of change in client congruence during person-centered therapy

Description

We will discuss the latest results arising from our research into patterns of change in client congruence that take place during person-centered therapy. The Strathclyde Inventory (SI; Freire, 2007) is a brief self-report instrument developed to measure Rogers’ concept of the fully functioning person: "the kind of person who would emerge if therapy was maximal" (Rogers, 1963, p.18). We collected data using the SI from 225 clients in person-centered therapy (range: 3-70 sessions) before, during and at the end of their therapeutic process. Next we used a variety of statistical methods to discover what we could learn from this data about the process of becoming more (or less) fully functioning, or congruent, during person-centered therapy. We found that on average our clients became more fully functioning, or congruent, by the end of their therapy (T(224) = -13.301; p = .000; Cohen’s d = .93). However, this result hides a large amount of variance at the individual level: for example, 53.8% (n=121) of our participants experienced statistically reliable change and eight participants (3.6%) experienced reliable deterioration (i.e. became less congruent) by the end of therapy. Given the strong tide towards increased congruence demonstrated by our participants as a
group, this result suggests that these eight participants experienced a very different process within therapy. We are currently exploring this result in more detail within a comparative case study project.

Period	9 Jul 2018
Event title	PCE 2018 Conference
Event type	Conference
Conference number	13th
Location	Vienna, AustriaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International