Clinicians’ prediction and recall of therapeutic interventions: practice research network study

Abstract

Conducted within a practice-research network in private practice, this exploratory study was aimed at examining whether clinicians can accurately predict and recall profiles of therapeutic interventions they used during an entire treatment for a given client. Based on a small sample (7 clinicians and 30 clients), the results tentatively suggest that the predictions that therapists made after session 3 regarding which types of techniques they would use, as well as the retrospective assessment of typical techniques they reported using in therapy, were accurate and generally discriminative. Clinical implications in line with deliberate practice are suggested and future research on complex questions related to clinical prediction is proposed.

Keywords:

• Process
• practice-oriented
• practice research network
• clinical prediction
• clinical recall

Acknowledgements

The authors are also thankful for the help of Samuel Knapp.

Notes

1. Twenty-nine clients declined to participate in the study, most frequently reporting concerns regarding confidentiality (n = 9), unnecessarily complicating treatment (n = 7), and just not being interested (n = 6). Fifty clients were not asked to participate because of their clinical state at the first interview. Forty of these un-recruited clients were judged to be cognitively impaired (with thirty-eight of them coming from a single therapist whose substantial subset of her practice involved conducting assessments with a geriatric population), seven were deemed to be in crisis during the first session, two exhibited psychotic/paranoid symptomology, and one client was physically incapable of filling the forms out. Of the clients who started the study, two dropped out of the study (one of them because of visual impairment) and continued treatment.