Title

Development of a method for studying thematic content of psychotherapy sessions

Document Type

Article

Department or Administrative Unit

Psychology

Publication Date

8-1996

Abstract

The authors developed a measure for categorizing the nature of the topic that clients and therapists discuss from moment to moment during psychotherapy. The Counseling Topic Classification System (CTCS) contains 55 topics and 8 emotional categories. It was used to code the thematic content of Donald Meichenbaum's and Hans Strupp's initial therapy sessions with a client named Richard. Our findings provided preliminary evidence that the CTCS is useful for coding the core topic of initial therapy sessions and that thematic content may be an important process and contextual variable. Methods are described for studying thematic content as a contextual variable and for presenting change process and discovery-oriented research findings so that they are more clinically meaningful.

Comments

This article was originally published in Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.

Due to copyright restrictions, this article is not available for free download from ScholarWorks @ CWU.

Journal

Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology

Rights

Copyright 1996 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.

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