Direct Measurement of Change: An Alternative to the Traditional Pre-Post Assessment?
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Traditionally, change in psychotherapy is assessed by comparing clients’ posttreatment status to their pretreatment status. Despite its advantages, this method (sometimes called “prospective” or “indirect”) has been criticized. As clients go through psychotherapy, they may not only experience changes in their symptoms or life situation — the very perspective from which they assess their symptoms and life situation may change as well (creating a phenomenon sometimes referred to as a “response shift” in psychometrics). If the posttreatment status is assessed from a different perspective than the pretreatment status, this would render the two measurements incomparable. A possible solution, though not a flawless one, is the “retrospective” or “direct” measurement of change which relies on the clients’ direct assessment of the direction and magnitude of change. This paper will focus on the psychometric analysis of the Czech version of the Questionnaire of Personal Changes (Krampen, 2010), a one-time retrospective outcome measure and its relationship to the traditional pre-post assessment of change on a sample of N = 222 clients. |
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