Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

"Psychotherapists do not necessarily grow in expertise with experience. An obstacle for gaining expertise is a lack of quality feedback. The primary training for therapists is workshops, which involve passive knowledge transfer rather than practice with feedback. A recent study compared the impact on therapist performance of a Motivational Interviewing (MI) workshop with Deliberate Practice (DP; expert feedback with practice) to a standard MI workshop. Therapists in the MI-DP workshop outperformed their counterparts. While this MI-DP workshop is promising for improving performance, research suggests that skills erode after workshops. The goal of this study is to explore the value of feedback in maintaining skills learned in a MI-DP workshop. Participants will consist of practicing therapists who will take the DP workshop. Each participant will conduct 4 sessions with an ambivalent student volunteer. Participants will be randomly assigned to one of three groups: the feedback as usual group, who only receive self and volunteer feedback; the expert feedback group, who receive video feedback of trained coders assessing resistance (using the Adapted Client Resistance Code (CRC)) and MI adherence (using the Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI) scale) of each session; the tape review group, who review their session recordings alone. Therapist and client outcomes will be measured across ambivalent volunteer sessions and participant pre and post-study sample tapes using CRC and MITI. This study has implications for the role of feedback in developing therapist expertise and the value of patient versus expert feedback. If clinicians can be trained to recognize empirically supported therapy processes, this lends support for process coding as clinical training."