Marianne Welmers

Chapter 4 98 Results Preliminary Analyses To begin, we calculated alliance means and standard deviations for all family members and all reporters. Results are depicted in Table 1. Overall, across different reporters (therapists, clients, and observers) alliances with mothers were strongest both at T1 and T2, followed by fathers and then youths. Clients provided the highest alliance ratings, followed by observers and then therapists, except for alliances with fathers and mothers at T2 (therapists had higher scores than observers, but still lower than clients). To test if differences between reporters were significant, we extended our two-level model with alliance reporter as a moderating variable. As shown in Table 2, we found significant differences between different reporters of the alliance, indicating that therapists generally reported weaker alliances as compared to clients and observers both at T1 and T2. Alliance Discrepancies Table 3 shows the results of multilevel regression analyses of alliances with family role as moderating variable. We found significant differences in alliances with the therapist between mothers, fathers, and youths. In line with our first hypothesis, alliances with parents were stronger as compared to youths both at T1 and T2, and alliances with mothers were stronger as compared to fathers both at T1 and T2. To test whether discrepancies between family members decrease over the course of treatment, we calculated the ICC between all different alliances across reporters in the multilevel model. At T1 the ICCwas .12 ( p < .01), indicating a small within family correlation between allianceswith different familymembers. At T2, the ICCwas .35 ( p < .05), indicating that within family alliance differences became smaller, as was in line with our hypothesis. Therapists’ Evaluation of Alliances With regard to the therapists’ evaluations of alliance discrepancies, results of multilevel interaction analyses between family member and alliance reporter showed no significant differences in the reports of alliance discrepancies between therapists, clients, and observers. In contrast to our hypothesis, this indicates that therapists report alliance differences between family members comparable with clients’ self-reports and observer reports.