An exploratory study of the working alliance : its measurement and relationship to therapy outcome
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this exploratory study was to develop a paper-and-pencil inventory to measure the strength and quality of the Therapeutic Working Alliance. This instrument, the Working Alliance Inventory (WAI), was based on the conceptualization of a Working Alliance developed by Bordin (1975,1976). According to Bordin, the Working Alliance has three components: Bond, Goal, and Task. The WAI was designed to tap the client's and therapist's perceptions of these components of a therapeutic relationship after the third therapy interview. An item pool was developed for the WAI, based upon a survey of the literature. The items formulated were refined and culled on the basis of two successive ratings by groups of expert raters. Following these ratings, the WAI was pilot tested in an analog environment using graduate students in counselling psychology as subjects. Finally, the WAI along with two existing tests, the Counselor Rating Form (CRF) (LaCrosse, 1977) and the Relationship Inventory (R-I) (Barrett-Lennard, 1962), were administered to client-therapist dyads representing a variety of theoretical approaches to psychotherapy. Psychotherapy outcome was measured by adaptations of the Client Posttherapy Questionnaire (Strupp et al., 1964). The results indicated that the WAI had adequate reliability, and evidence was gathered supporting the instrument's construct validity. The analysis of the data suggests that there is a strong correlational relationship between Empathy and the alliance dimension of Bond, and a moderate relationship between Empathy and Goal. The Task dimension was reasonably independent of Empathy. All of the WAI dimensions had low correlations with the concepts measured by the CRF. The client reported Working Alliance Task dimension correlated significantly with satisfaction, change, and composite outcome, while the Goal dimension correlated significantly with satisfaction. All of the therapist reported alliance dimensions correlated significantly with satisfaction and change as well as the composite outcome score. Multiple regression analysis using all of the client predictor variables (Empathy, Trustworthiness, Expertness, Attractiveness, Bond, Task, Goal) suggested that the Task scale of the WAI, which was designed to measure the perceived relevance of therapy events, may be the most efficient therapy outcome prognosticator of the variables investigated. The nature of the sample and the low subject-to-variable ratio in this research suggested that the study must be replicated in order to more firmly establish the stability and generalizability of the findings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".