Marianne Welmers

Chapter 5 114 which family members bond with each other in treatment and collaborate on shared family goals. This within-family alliance was first introduced in the literature by Pinsof and Catherall (1986), and elaborated on by Friedlander et al. (2006) as shared sense of purpose within the family (SSP) . Studies on the effect of the family’s shared purpose on treatment outcome consistently support that higher levels of SSP positively impact family treatment outcome. This finding emerged fromseveral small samples receiving brief family therapy (Escudero et al., 2008; Friedlander et al., 2008), family therapy with involuntary clients (Sotero et al., 2018), and family-based treatment for adolescent Anorexia Nervosa (Isserlin, & Couturier, 2012). However, the current body of evidence on the association between thewithin-family alliance and outcome in family treatment for youth problems is relatively small (Welmers – van de Poll et al., 2018), and to our knowledge no studies have yet been published on the effect of the family’s shared purpose in home-based family treatment. Present Study The present explorative study investigated the association between family members’ unbalanced alliances and the family’s shared sense of purpose, and youth behavior problems after home-based family treatment. We hypothesized that a greater imbalance between familymembers’ alliances with the therapist would be negatively associated and higher levels of shared sense of purpose within the family would be positively associated with a decrease of youth behavior problems after treatment. Methods Participants and Treatment Setting Participants were 49 parents ( n = 30 (step)mothers, n = 19 (step)fathers) and 21 children from 29 families. The mean age of the child for whom the treatment was indicated was 9.2 years ( SD = 4.3; range 1 – 16). The mean age of the children participating in the study was 11.1 years ( SD = 2.7; range 5-16), and the mean age of parents was 38.3 years ( SD 8,5; range 25-55). In one family, one parent was born in a foreign western country, and in three families one or both parents were born in a non-western country. Participating families received home-based family treatment for youth problems, called Intensieve Pedagogische Thuishulp ( IPT, Van der Steege, 2007). They were seen by 22 IPT-workers (male: n = 2, M age 41; SD = 8.5), with an average of 8.4 ( SD = 4.9) years of experience as IPT-worker. All had a social work related (post-) bachelor’s degree. Intensieve Pedagogische Thuishulp (IPT, Van der Steege, 2007) is a home based family treatment in the Netherlands, for families dealing with complex child behavior and parenting problems. Most families experience problems in other domains as well, such