Marianne Welmers

Alliance and Treatment Outcome 27 CHAPTER 2 Methods Sample of studies To obtain studies for this article, we conducted the search as prescribed by PRISMA (Moher, Liberati, Tetzlaff, Altman, & The PRISMA Group, 2009). Nine databases relevant to the field of this study were searched: Wiley Online Library, Eric, Academic Search Premier, PubMed, Medline, PsycInfo, PsycBooks, Web of Science and ProQuest. The following combination of search terms was used for titles, abstracts and keywords: (“alliance” OR “bond”) AND (“youth” OR “child*” OR “adolescent*” OR “teen*” OR “parent*”) AND (“famil*” OR “system*” OR “multisystem*”) AND (“outcome” OR “effect*” OR “efficacy” OR “dropout” OR “retention”). In addition, retrieved articles were cross-referenced, and Google Scholar was hand-searched. Scholars with an expertise on alliance in family therapy were asked if they had any unpublished data of interest for this study. If studies were not retrievable from databases, authors were contacted. Four unpublished dissertations could not be included, because we could not trace the authors or the authors did not respond to our request. The search was completed in October 2017. Studies were included in the meta-analysis if: (a) treatment was conducted for youth problems or for youth being at risk as a result of parental or family problems, (b) treatment was family-involved: in addition to the targeted youth at least one other family member was actively involved in multiple therapy sessions, resulting in multiple interdependent alliances during treatment, (c) targeted youth had an average age under 21, (d) one or more measures of alliance, working alliance, therapeutic alliance, or another measure regarding the emotional bond between client and therapist, agreement or collaboration on goals or tasks between client and therapist, within-family alliance or family-therapist alliance were included, (e) one or more measures of treatment outcome on youth, parent or family functioning or retentionmeasured during, at the end or at follow-up of treatment were included, (f) a correlation between themeasuresmentioned in criteria (d) and (e) was examined regardless of study design, (g) the study report was available in full text, and (h) the study report was written in English, Dutch or German. A flow diagram of the search strategy and screening process is depicted in Figure 1. We included 28 studies ( k = 23 published studies, k = 4 unpublished dissertations, k = 1 unpublished paper), reporting on 21 independent samples comprising a total of N = 2126 families. An overview of included studies and their characteristics is shown in Table 1. An overview of sample characteristics for each study is shown in Table 2.