Measuring psychotherapy processes with the Jones’Psychotherapy Process Q-Set: Preliminary results

The purpose of this study is the identification of the differences and similarities in the process relative to Systemic Relational Therapy (SRT), Cognitive Constuctivist Therapy (CCT), and Brief Strategic Therapy (BST). The research was undertaken following an observation systematic approach: 62 therapy sessions (15 SRT, 4 CCT, 42 BST) were used, recordered on audio or audio-video and transcribed exactly, relative to 21 adolescent and adult participants (8 males and 13 females), and a preliminary Italian adaptation of the Psychotherapy Process Q-sort (PQS; Jones, 1985) was used. In order to investigate the processes which seem to best characterize the three psychotherapeutic approaches, descriptive analysies were conducted. The results of this study have substantially an indicative value, but they nevertheless allow us to grasp some indication and trace some lines of development in this sector of research. Specifically, the Psychotherapy Process Q-sort seem to be an important pan-theoretical instrument, capable of offering a further strategy for the analysis of processes in psychotherapy.