Development of the CoMTAS-Conversational Model Therapy Adherence Scale

Shaun Halovic, Anthony Korner, Loyola McLean, Clare Chapman, Joan Haliburn, Janine Stevenson, David Butt, Phillip Graham, Stephen Malloch, Tessa Phillips, Russell Meares

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    Measuring adherence to a given psychotherapeutic approach has numerous benefits, such as ensuring therapist fidelity in the reporting of patient outcomes, the verification of therapist expertise, and facilitating the training of new psychotherapists by minimizing the cognitive load within a complex skillset. The Conversational Model Therapy Adherence Scale (CoMTAS) was developed by Russell Meares, one of the founders of Conversational Model Therapy (CMT). Further refinement of the CoMTAS involved consultation with Meares and several workshops with senior clinicians. Pilot testing followed with expert and novice CMT clinicians rating gold standard CMT recordings, more robustly diverse therapy recordings of novice therapists, and also recordings where the raters were blind to the identity of the therapist and patient. The CoMTAS showed consistently high inter-rater reliability and test-retest reliability over a period of 11 weeks. Furthermore, expert clinicians rated similarly with novice clinicians, thereby suggesting that minimal training in CMT is required to make reliably valid judgements of CMT adherence on the CoMTAS.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)511-536
    Number of pages26
    JournalPsychodynamic Psychiatry
    Volume46
    Issue number4
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Dec 2018

    Keywords

    • conversational model
    • psychotherapy
    • adherence
    • psychometric
    • training

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