Marianne Welmers

Alliance Discrepancies 95 CHAPTER 4 Procedures Participating families were drawn from four teams specialized in IPT of two Dutch youth care organizations. When a family started treatment with an IPT-worker of a participating team, they were informed about the research project by the IPT-worker or institution and received a letterwith information. Inone team, all IPT-workersdirectly asked their clients toparticipate. In the remaining three teams amember of the research teamcalled the family to ask them to participate. Children were asked to complete theWorking Alliance Inventory (WAI) and were included in coding observations using the System for Observing Family Therapy Alliances (SOFTA) when they were 8 years or older. Therapists were asked to reflect on alliances with all familymembers involved in treatment, regardless of age. Participating familymembers of 12 years and older signed an informed consent letter and the project was approved by the ethical boardof theFacultyof Social andBehavioral Scienceof theUniversityof Amsterdam. All participating families received a €10 gift card and two families were randomly selected to receive a voucher for visiting a zoo or fun park of their own choice. When a family participated, two sessions with an IPT-worker at the family’s home were videotaped. For T1—in the early treatment phase—the third session (and exceptionally the fourthor fifth) was filmed. We chose the third session because familieswere informed about the research and asked to consider participation in the first session. By choosing the third session they had some time to consider participation, but treatment was still in its starting phase, which lasts in this model of treatment about six weeks (Van der Steege, 2007). The second video-observation (T2) was two months later, when treatment was in the phase of active change. For 14 families there was no T2 measure available because the treatment had already ended ( n =5), or therapist or clients did not want to participate anymore because the situation had changed ( n = 9). There was no T1 measure for 2 families, and 4 families only participated by completing the WAI and had no video-observations. None of these 4 families responded to the request to complete theWAI at T2. Study dropouts were not excluded because this might have decreased the clinical representativeness of our study. We compared alliance measures at T1 for dropouts and completers by performing amultilevel regression analysis of a dichotomous dropout variable at T2 on client-reported, therapist-reportedandobserver reportedallianceat T1, and foundnosignificant differences ( p = .586), which indicates that selective attrition was unlikely. Measurements Working Alliance Inventory – Short Form (WAI-s) To assess the alliance as perceived by therapists and family members, we used the Working Alliance Inventory, Short Form (WAI-s; Horvath & Greenberg, 1989; Killian, Forrester, Westlake, & Antonopoulou, 2017). The questionnaire consists of 12 items (e.g. “My family counselor and I agree upon what I should do in order to improve the way things are going in my family” for the client version