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Determining Counseling Outcome
This is an individual research project (my dissertation). It is supervised by Mnr Chris Jeneke (staff member of Psychology Department at Unisa) and co-supervised by Dr AT van Schoor (director of Unisa's Bureau for student counseling and career development).
Background and focus
Investigating about factors that govern the outcome of psychotherapy / counseling goes back many years. Research in this area has been undertaken with much interest since Rosenzweig (1936) and Freud (1937) published their benchmark papers on the subject (Tally, Butcher, Maguire, and Pinkerton, 1992). Researchers thus far, have delineated a number of factors that influence psychotherapy / counseling outcome. Patient, therapist or counselor, and treatment variables have all been found to be noteworthy, but by far the most impressive determinants of outcome are perceived to lie in the client (Tally et al. 1992). However, little has been reported about some of the patient/client variables, such as locus of control, been measured in relation to the outcome of psychotherapy/counseling interventions.
To that end, the key purpose of my forward-looking study is to locate the relationship between this personality construct (locus of control) and the outcome of one of the frequently used treatment modality (single-session psychotherapy / counseling). Is there a correlation between clients’ degree of inner direction, as measured by Internal/External Locus of control Test, and succeeding in very-brief psychotherapy / counseling?
The study also traces predictable relationships between the outcome of this method of treatment and few other client characteristics including: age, gender, education, race and previous experience of the treatment. It is believed that this could be especially helpful in assessing the need for and the type of strategies to be used supporting clients in very-brief interventions, even before treatment begins.