Process analysis of group interaction in therapeutic groups.

Abstract

Group psychotherapy works! Armed with a growing number of metaanalytic studies, beginning with the classic work of Smith, Glass, and Miller (1980) and complemented by a recent influential national survey of consumers (Seligman, 1995), reviewers of the group psychotherapy research literature can now state with a reasonable degree of confidence that group psychotherapy yields beneficial effects when compared with no treatment and equivalent results when compared with more costly individual psychotherapy. The prototypical laboratory study in these meta-analytic reviews convincingly demonstrates that treating a small group of individuals who manifest a discrete, circumscribed, and homogeneous set of symptoms, such as those who have social phobia, trauma, or depression, in a time-limited, cognitive-behavioral format is ameliorative. Although questions have been raised about the representativeness and relevance of these studies to the way group therapy is actually practiced in the field, the experimental findings per se are uncontested.

Rating group therapist interventions: The validation of the Group Psychotherapy Intervention Rating Scale.

“…Keywords: group leadership, group psychotherapy, group assessment, group cohesion One of the most neglected areas in group research literature has been that of leader effects on groups (Dykeman & Appleton, 2002;Greene, 2000). Accordingly, a recent review of the current status of group psychotherapy research by Burlingame, MacKenzie, and Strauss (2004) issued a call for the development of leader measures as a next step in the group treatment literature.…”

Attitudes to Group Assessments: Prospective Psychotherapists’ Experiences of Being Assessed by Fellow Students

“…Green [54] highlighted the irony that the most empirically studied group, therapy approach (CBT) ignores the group as a "group" and as a potential therapeutic agent in itself. The results of this study support the hypothesis that the group as a "group" is very important for the learning process in CBT tutorial.…”

An Exploratory Study of Member Attraction, Climate, and Behavioral Outcomes of Anger-Coping Group Therapy for Children with Emotional Disturbance

“…The overwhelming consensus in the literature is that group counseling is as clinically valid as individual counseling for the prevention and remediation of mental health concerns (Fuhriman & Burlingame, 1994;Kivlighan, Coleman, & Anderson, 2000). Although this assertion is based largely on meta-analyses of processes and outcomes of group-counseling interventions with adults (Fuhriman & Burlingame, 1994;Greene, 2000;Tillitski, 1990), there is a growing body of literature that indicates the same equivalency in treatment modes for children and adolescents (Shechtman & Ben-David, 1999). In addition, group counseling is a highly popular treatment modality for children in schools.…”