Clinician's Digest

Researchers like Michael Lambert and the late Ken Howard have proven that therapists who receive structured feedback from or about clients after each session have fewer premature terminations and stronger therapy alliances—factors that generally lead to more successful therapy outcomes. To assist this process, clinician–researchers such as Lambert, Scott Miller, and Barry Duncan have developed short questionnaires for clients to complete, providing quick snapshots of the therapeutic progress at every session. But the brevity of these questionnaires may also be a limitation.

Such forms focus on one or two dimensions of therapy—the alliance and/or how clients assess their own progress—mere snippets of one client’s subjective experience. Longer forms could give therapists much more information about what’s really happening in therapy. However, since few therapists take the time to use even the short forms already available, preferring to rely on their own instincts, perceptions, and emotionally charged clinical moments, it seems a stretch to suppose they’d welcome longer questionnaires.

What if there were a multidimensional feedback system that took clients just five to seven minutes to fill out, covered more of the complexities of therapy, had a systemic perspective, fed the information to therapists in user-friendly graphs on the Internet that required just a couple of minutes to examine, and revealed information not always apparent in sessions? Family…