The validity of the Group Questionnaire: Construct clarity or construct drift?

Abstract

The Group Questionnaire (GQ) is a recently developed survey that assesses the quality of the therapeutic relationship in group treatment by measuring quality across 3 structural dimensions of the relationship: member-member, member-leader, and mem ber-group. Its 3 quality subscales-Positive Bonding Relationship, Positive Working Relationship, and Negative Relationship-are taken from the 3-factor conceptualiza tion of the group therapeutic relationship originally proposed by Johnson and col leagues (2005). The purpose of the present study was to estimate the GQ's construct and criterion-related validity by (a) replicating the Johnson et al. (2005) factor structure with a similar sample and (b) correlating the GQ with the measures from which it was originally derived (i.e., Working Alliance Inventory, Bums Empathy Scale, Therapeu tic Factors Inventory, Group Climate Questionnaire). Two hundred ninety participants were recruited from 65 treatment groups at 4 university counseling centers and 1 community mental health clinic. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) fit indexes from both single-and multiple-level analyses met standards for acceptable model fit. Intra class correlation coefficients (ICC) suggested the GQ is sensitive to group level processes, and the predicted correlation coefficients between the GQ and the criterion measures were sufficiently high to lend support for the GQ's criterion-related validity. The present study's findings provide support that the GQ is an empirically valid measure of the quality of the group therapeutic relationship.

The Group Questionnaire: A clinical and empirically derived measure of group relationship

“…More specifically, the GQ was recently tested with 438 members of German inpatient groups (Bormann et al, 2011) and the EFA supported the model reported herein. Finally, Thayer (2012) recently collected a sixth sample composed of 290 group members from 65 groups drawn from four US counseling centers who completed the 30-item GQ and also replicated the original Johnson et al model. Six studies from four countries studying groups that include non-clinical process groups, 2-year analytic groups, and psycho-educational groups for the seriously mentally ill provide strong support for the three-factor model. Thus, we offer Positive Bonding, Positive Working, and Negative Relationship as a more parsimonious explanation of the therapeutic relationship in group to replace the multitude of constructs that populate the current group psychotherapy literature.…”

Bedeutsame Ereignisse während eines selbsterfahrungsorientierten Gruppentrainings für Psychologiestudenten – auf der Basis von Psychodrama und Aktionsmethoden

“…Using it, a trainer can clarify and understand personal and group processes. The idea of ongoing monitoring of the process and of the clients' perception of the psychological treatment situation postulated in the discussion about the effectiveness of psychotherapy (Lambert 2010(Lambert , 2017Shimokawa et al 2010;Burlingame et al 2013;Thayer and Burlingame 2014) should be also taken into consideration in the context of psychological psychodramabased training. This study can be located among practice-oriented forms of research in psychodrama (Krall 2015;Sales 2015) and psychodrama group process research, which were strongly postulated by Indagator and Fung Chung (2013).…”

Integrating psychotherapy research with public health and public policy goals for incarcerated women and other vulnerable populations

“…An exploratory model with Bonding, Working, and Negative factors provided the best fit to the data, indicating that group members' primary conceptual distinctions among within-group relationships were made by relationship qualities (e.g., therapeutic bond, therapeutic work, empathic failures) rather than the status or role of others (i.e., leader, member, or whole group), and that group members saw positive and negative relationship factors as orthogonal, rather than as opposite ends of a single continuum (Johnson, Burlingame, Olsen, Davies, & Gleave, 2005). This new model has been replicated several times (Bakali, Baldwin, & Lorentzen, 2009; Bormann, Burlingame, & Strauss, 2011; Bormann & Strauss, 2007; Krogel et al, 2013; Thayer, 2012) and has provided an organizing conceptual framework for subsequent efforts to study group processes (AGPA Core-R Task Force, 2006; Burlingame, Krogel, & Johnson, 2008; Krogel et al, 2013). …”