A Part of and Apart From: Recent Studies on the Relationships of Connection and Disconnection to Treatment Outcome in the Psychotherapy Group

Abstract

This review highlights two current papers, one a formal and sophisticated meta-analysis of some 55 empirical studies on the cohesion– outcome relationship (Burlingame, McClendon, & Yang, 2018) and the other a creative synthesis of two recent studies on the individual member’s relationships to other members, the leader, and the groupas-a-whole, and the degree to which these relationships affect therapeutic outcome (Gold & Kivlighan, 2018). While employing very different approaches to review selected segments of the research literature, both papers nicely illustrate how experienced psychotherapy researchers make sense out of isolated and disparate findings, transforming them into clinically meaningful guideposts to help therapists think about group processes and outcomes. These two works exemplify well how the processes of data analysis, synthesis, International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 69: 354–360, 2019 Copyright © The American Group Psychotherapy Association, Inc. ISSN: 0020-7284 print/1943-2836 online DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00207284.2019.1614450