[HYBRID EVENT] Challenging perceptions of change

This event will take place both in-person and online via Microsoft Teams.

In person - C45 Dearing Building, Jubilee Campus

Online - Teams link will be sent on registration

We live in a measurement culture in which we are told that everything can be measured including the human experience. The consequence of this culture for the counselling world are rules about which clients have ‘good outcomes’ (i.e. change) and which do not. These rules have profound implications for clients, counsellors and counselling services.

But what if our culture has got it wrong? What if the typical approach to outcome measurement cannot be relied upon to represent the change that clients experience during the counselling process?

In this presentation, we will look at what happened in four cases of person-centred therapy that took place in the Strathclyde Counselling and Psychotherapy Research Clinic. According to the typical rules for interpreting scores collected on outcome instruments (i.e. the difference between pre- and post-therapy scores) applied in practice settings, these cases are examples of ‘no change’. We used the Hermeneutic Single Case Efficacy Design method to investigate each case then synthesised our findings from all four cases. This enabled us to explore the clients’ experiences in greater detail and depth. It also allowed us to compare our findings across the four cases and also with a previous study that looked at the experiences of eight clients from the same dataset who were designated as having either good or poor outcomes according to their scores.

We learned that the image of ‘no change’ created by their outcome scores was very different to the therapeutic experiences of these clients. I will outline potential explanations for this difference, challenging some of the assumptions that underpin the measurement culture, and encouraging a renewed appreciation for the complexity of change within the counselling process.

Dr Susan Stephen - Biography

Susan is a person-centered therapist, supervisor, trainer and researcher based in Glasgow, Scotland. She is a lecturer in counselling at the University of Strathclyde and director of the Strathclyde Counselling and Psychotherapy Research Clinic. Her research interests include investigating the development and cross-cultural relevance of congruent functioning in person-centered therapy, exploring methodological innovations in case study research, and supporting practitioners to develop an informed approach to measurement in counselling. An active member of the national and international person-centred community, Susan is currently a co-editor of the international peer-reviewed journal, Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies. Susan is also a co-editor of the third edition of the Handbook of Person-Centred Psychotherapy and Counselling (2024) to which she contributed a new chapter on 'The non-directive attitude'.

Refreshments (tea/coffee) will be provided as part of this event.

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