Psychologists, psychotherapists, and other mental health experts receive extensive training to ensure high competence in the treatment of psychological problems. However, scientific evidence of the importance of therapist competence for successful treatment delivery is lacking. The existing approaches to measuring therapist competence have largely relied on self-evaluations that can be highly subjective, and external ratings of natural sessions that can be influenced by many features of individual sessions, e.g., nature and severity of clients' problems. The current research aims to develop and validate a novel method to evaluate competence that is sensitive to previous training and responsive to further training. The method utilizes the cutting-edge theoretical framework of process-based therapy to build a competence task that offers a standardized way to measure competence across the traditional schools of psychotherapy in a precise and clinically meaningful way.

2024

2028