The work presents a computer-aided method of content analysis applicable to verbatim transcripts of psychotherapy: the Automated Co-occurrence Analysis for Semantic Mapping (ACASM). ACASM is able to perform a context-sensitive strategy of analysis aimed at mapping the meanings of the text through a trans-theoretical procedure. The paper is devoted to the presentation of the method and testing its validity. To the latter end we have compared ACASM and independent blind human coders on two tasks of content analysis: (a) estimating the semantic similarity between two utterances; (b) the semantic classification of a set of utterances. Results highlight that: (a) ACASM's estimates of semantic similarity are consistent with the corresponding estimates provided by coders; (b) coders' agreement and coder-ACASM agreement on the task of semantic classification have the same magnitude. Results lead to the conclusion that the content analysis produced by ACASM is indistinguishable from that performed by human coders.
A content analysis of the representative Journals in the field of psychothera-py research has been performed. The analysis focused on the articles’ keywords. We ana-lyzed 7,086 works published in 17 Journals, in the period 2005-2011, using a two-step multidimensional procedure. Firstly, a cluster analysis led to the extrapolation of 4 groups of keywords, each of them interpreted as the marker of a topic active within the literature. Secondly, a factorial analysis was carried out in order to picture the thematic orientation of the most representative Journals, namely the main topics they focus on and how they differ from each other in this respect.
The two-stage semiotic model (TSSM) suggests that the basic dynamics of a psychotherapy process could be described in terms of alternation of two different processes aimed respectively at constraining patients’ meanings regulating experience and action (deconstructive process) and at supporting the elaboration of innovative meanings (constructive process). The present case study tests the specificity of each of these processes in terms of clinically relevant features detected at interpersonal, intrapsychical, and clinical levels. A 76-session good-outcome psychodynamic treatment was studied. The results enable constructive and deconstructive sessions to be differentiated in terms of interaction modalities and the patient’s modalities of thinking. This is consistent with the TSSM hypothesis that the constructive and deconstructive sessions are composed of qualitatively different clinical processe
This study was aimed at developing the GMI (Grid of the Models of Interpretations), a category system for measuring therapist interpretations in transcripts of both cognitive and psychodynamic psychotherapies. Satisfactory agreement levels were found among the five raters used to test reliability. Moreover, the GMI-based description of interpretations in different clinical orientations appeared clinically meaningful. GMI promises to be helpful in analyzing interpretations in terms of case-specific and distinctive patterns.
La psicoterapia può essere descritta facendo riferimento a due dimensioni principali: l'esito (ovvero gli effetti di un trattamento) e il processo (ovvero ciò che accade nel corso di un trattamento). Nelle sue prime fasi, lo studio empirico della psicoterapia si è concentrato principalmente, anche se non esclusivamente, su questi due aspetti distinti, dando origine a ciò che prende il nome di ricerca sull'esito e ricerca sul processo psicoterapeutico. In questo periodo, che va dai primi anni '50 ai primi anni '80, nasce e si afferma quello che può essere definito il paradigma classico della ricerca in psicoterapia, caratterizzato da una adesione ai principi metodologici della scienza neo-positivistica. Con il presente articolo intendiamo descrivere le caratteristiche principali della ricerca sull’esito e sul processo terapeutico nel corso di queste tre decadi, con particolare riferimento ai diversi approcci e disegni di ricerca, ai livelli di osservazione, e all'analisi dei dati. Inoltre, ci proponiamo di discutere quelli che noi consideriamo essere gli aspetti critici in ciascuno di questi due diversi ambiti di ricerca.
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