The working alliance has received consistent empirical support relating the
construct to psychotherapy outcome. There is no empirical research on any particular
techniques that may prove useful at increasing the level of working alliance. In this
study, the therapeutic compliment is defined, discussed, and compared with other
therapeutic interventions to find its usefulness in therapy and its ability to impact the
working alliance. 120 African-Americans from a large southwestern university and a
medium southeastern university participated in this study by viewing one of six mock
therapy sessions that had one of three different interventions: Therapeutic Compliment,
Simple Compliment, and Advanced Accurate Empathy. The mock sessions were created
to provide two levels of session relationship (high and low). The participants completed
three measures, the Working Alliance Inventory, Hopefulness Scale, and Accurate
Empathy Scale, to determine the perceptions of the different interventions. The study
utilized multiple analyses of variances (ANOVAs) to compare the means of the three
interventions.Statistical significance was not found with overall general working alliance
scores from the Working Alliance Inventory (WAI). The individual subscales of the
WAI, goals, tasks, and bonds, however; did reveal significance when comparing the
interventions across one level of the session relationship (high). The interventions were
not statistically different from each other in terms of perceived hopefulness and
empathy. No significance was found when comparing the interventions with perceived
hopefulness of outcome or level of perceived empathy. The implications from this study
include a first look at the use of complimenting in therapy and a first attempt to analyze
a specific technique to create an influence on the working alliance. Further research is
still needed to understand which techniques are more beneficial at creating an affect on
the working alliance.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1274 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | Duncan, Bryan Thomas |
| Contributors | Brossart, Dan, Conoley, Collie |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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