This article describes a new instrument, the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP), which measures distress arising from interpersonal sources. The IIP meets the need for an easily administered self-report inventory that describes the types of interpersonal problems that people experience and the level of distress associated with them before, during, and after psychotherapy. Two studies are reported. In Study 1, psychometric data are presented for 103 patients who were tested at the beginning and end of a waiting period before they began brief dynamic psychotherapy. On both occasions, a factor analysis yielded the same six subscales; these scales showed high internal consistency and high test-retest reliability. Study 2 demonstrated the instrument's sensitivity to clinical change. In this study, a subset of patients was tested before, during, and after 20 sessions of psychotherapy. Their improvement on the IIP agreed well with all other measures of their improvement, including those generated by the therapist and by an independent evaluator. Although the HP and the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R) were both sensitive to change during the first 10 sessions, only the IIP was sensitive to change in the second 10 sessions. Furthermore, the difference between patient distress on the IIP and on the SCL-90-R successfully discriminated between patients who completed the full treatment and those who did not. Finally, some kinds of problems were more amenable to treatment than others. Problems of assertiveness, for example, were discussed more often and improved more readily than problems of intimacy. This article describes the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP), a new measure designed to help patients and therapists identify interpersonal sources of distress that are often the focus of psychotherapy. Although major advances have occurred in measuring interpersonal behaviors, traits, and styles (e.g., Benjamin, 1974Benjamin, , 1986Kiesler, 1983;Wiggins, 1979), there is still a need for an easily administered self-report inventory that describes the types of interpersonal problems that people experience.

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We describe a new method for aggregating psychodynamic formulations of independent clinicians. 15 patients (10 female and 5 male, aged 23-41) were interviewed before they began brief dynamic psychotherapy. Different panels of 8 formulators (drawn from a pool of 72 psychodynamic clinicians with 10-38 years of clinical experience) observed each videotaped interview and wrote individual formulations. The text of each formulation was divided into thought-units, and thought-units that occurred 3 or more times were combined into a final consensual formulation. (One case was formulated twice to demonstrate the replicability of the method). Other clinical raters then read each consensual formulation and judged, for a list of interpersonal problems, whether each problem was apt to be distressing for that patient. The raters were very successful in predicting which problems were later discussed in treatment. Predictions were best for formulations with a high proportion of interpersonal content.

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