Summary
The Client Preferences in Psychological Therapies Research subgroup sits within our Therapy Relationship research area at the School of Psychology, University of Roehampton. Staff and students are exploring client preferences in counselling and psychotherapy and their relationship to therapy outcomes. At the forefront of client preferences research, a central focus of our work is creating and testing client preferences measures that can improve therapy experiences, engagement, and outcomes. Our work explores shared decision-making approaches to better understand preferences for service users and to increase the alliance and the value of therapeutic work.
Convenors
Oleksandr Lugovyi
Research Student (PhD)
Charlotte Zamani
Research Student (PsychD Counselling)
Current projects
- Developing a waitlist preference measure that clients can use to communicate their preferences to mental health services.
- Exploring the origins of client psychotherapy preferences.
- Developing a client preference measure for use within an NHS/IAPT setting.
- Developing a preference measure for use with young people. Funded by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.
- Young people’s experiences of using a client preference measure.
- Exploring experiences of matching race and ethnicity of clients to therapists.
Staff
Dr Robert Allan
Dr Savin Bapir-Tardy
s.bapir-tardy@roehampton.ac.uk
Dr Avantika Bhatia
avantika.bhatia@roehampton.ac.uk
Professor Mick Cooper
Dr John Rae
Dr Laura Vowels
Students
Sally-Ann Adams
PsychD Counselling
Current research indicates that clients seeking psychological support are commonly added to lengthy waitlists during the time-to-treatment wait. However, little is known about clients’ preferences during this period. This study aims to develop and validate a waitlist preference measure that clients can use to articulate their waitlist preferences to mental health services. Services could use the psychometrically robust measure to identify clients’ preferences and amend their waitlist management strategy while staying within their remits.
Oleksandr Lugovyi
PhD
Research has found that therapists who use a client preference toolkit within their practice demonstrate greater therapeutic recovery compared to practitioners who do not. Currently, the National Health Service (NHS) does not implement a client preference toolkit in most mental health interventions, possibly due to limited research on the influence of preferences on treatment outcomes. Therefore, this study aims to address this research gap by identifying how client preferences are used within NHS mental health services and by developing a client preference toolkit.
Monna Shahna
PsychD Counselling
Current research demonstrates that people of colour have a strong preference for working with therapists of similar backgrounds, however, the results on therapeutic outcomes has been inconclusive. This study is aimed at exploring racial/ethnic matching as experienced by clients from minoritised racial and ethnic backgrounds who also identify as British, to better understand the impact of this practice and contribute to making therapy more accessible and effective for this group that has long been underrepresented and underserved.
Betül Tatar, PhD
PsychD Counselling
There is growing research that identifies what clients prefer in psychotherapy. However, there is limited empirical understanding of the specific properties and nature of these preferences. This study aims to explore one such property: the origins of client psychotherapy preferences. Longitudinal interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) methodology will be used to explore how clients make sense of the origins of their psychotherapy preferences. The longitudinal design will allow an exploration of not only what clients perceive the origins of their preferences to be, but also any potential changes in perception over the course of psychotherapy.
Charlotte Zamani
PsychD Counselling
Youth feedback and involvement in the research and testing of preference tools is essential and ethical to understand critical factors of CYP engagement and dropout. The University of Roehampton, through funding from the BACP, is creating a ‘Young Person’s Therapy Preference Measure’ (working title). This study aims to test the measure using IPA analysis to examine how and why preferences promote enhanced therapy engagement for YP, including what helpful and unhelpful factors mean deeper connections with the therapist, the therapeutic process, and with themselves.
Key papers
Bowens, M., & Cooper, M. (2012). Development of a client feedback tool: a qualitative study of therapists’ experiences of using the Therapy Personalisation Forms. European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling, 14, 47-62.
Cooper, M., Di Malta, G., Knox, S., Oddli, H. W., & Swift, J. K. (2023). Patient perspectives on working with preferences in psychotherapy: A consensual qualitative research study. Psychotherapy Research, 33(8), 1117-1131. https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2022.2161967
Cooper, M., Messow, C.-M., McConnachie, A., Freire, E., Elliott, R., Heard, D., Williams, C., & Morrison, J. (2018). Patient preference as a predictor of outcomes in a pilot trial of person-centred counselling versus low-intensity cognitive behavioural therapy for persistent sub-threshold and mild depression. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 31, 460-476. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515070.2017.1329708
Cooper, M., & Norcross, J. C. (2016). A brief, multidimensional measure of clients' therapy preferences: The Cooper-Norcross Inventory of Preferences (C-NIP). International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, 16(1), 87-98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijchp.2015.08.003
Cooper, M., Norcross, J. C., Raymond-Barker, B., & Hogan, T. P. (2019). Psychotherapy preferences of laypersons and mental health professionals: Whose therapy is it? Psychotherapy, 56, 205-216. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000226
Cooper, M., van Rijn, B., Chryssafidou, E., & Stiles, W. B. (2022). Activity preferences in psychotherapy: what do patients want and how does this relate to outcomes and alliance? Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 35(3), 503-526. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515070.2021.1877620
Norcross, J. C., & Cooper, M. (2021). Personalizing psychotherapy: Assessing and accommodating client preferences. APA.
Řiháček, T., Cooper, M., Cígler, H., She, Z., Di Malta, G., & Norcross, J. C. (2023). The Cooper-Norcross Inventory of Preferences: Measurement invariance across & international datasets and languages. Psychotherapy Research, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2023.2255371
She, Z., Xi, J., Cooper, M., Norcross, J. C., & Di Malta, G. (2023). Validation of the Cooper-Norcross Inventory of Preferences in Chinese lay clients and mental health professionals: Factor structure, measurement invariance, and scale differences. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 70(4), 436-447. https://doi.org/10.1037/cou0000661
Swift, J. K., Callahan, J. L., Cooper, M., & Parkin, S. R. (2018). The impact of accommodation client preferences in psychotherapy: A meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 74(11), 1924-1937. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.22680
Swift, J. K., Callahan, J. L., Cooper, M., & Parkin, S. R. (2019). Preferences. In J. C. Norcross & B. E. Wampold (Eds.), Psychotherapy relationships that work (3rd ed., pp. 157-187). Oxford University.
Wallace, K., & Cooper, M. (2015). Development of supervision personalisation forms: A qualitative study of the dimensions along which supervisors’ practices vary. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 15(1), 31-40.
C-NIP1.1-2019-04-04-with-guidelines.pdf (pluralisticpractice.com)
Key grants
BACP 2023 Collaborative Research Grant