Robert L. Hatcher

Initial training in professional psychology: The practicum competencies outline.

The practicum is the first practice-based step toward independent professional competence in psychology. As the practicum becomes a focus of interest in psychology education, there is a strong need to identify the domains and levels of competence that should be the focus of practicum training. To address this need, the current report introduces the Practicum Competencies Outline, a summary of competency domains and expected levels of competence that may be attained during practicum. The relationship between the Outline and other recent work on competencies in psychology is discussed, and its potential uses in education and training are reviewed.

Psychological mindedness and abstract reasoning in late childhood and adolescence: An exploration using new instruments

This study introduces two new measures of psychological mindedness, applying them in a study of the growth of abstract thinking in children and adolescents in a developmental design. The capacity to achieve psychological understanding of the self and of others involves comprehension of the motives, attitudes, and characteristics of the self and others. Psychological mindedness toward the self (PS) and toward others (PO) may be seen as complex cognitive capacities that should show a pattern of related development in childhood. Three groups of 60 fifth, eighth, and twelfth graders completed two measures of formal operations and two instruments to assess the two components of psychological mindedness. We find that psychological mindedness and abstract thinking both increase significantly with age, although the relationship between them is complex and varies with gender and age. Because the development of abstract reasoning skills does not correlate with the development of psychological mindedness in a simple way, a more complex model is necessary, taking age and gender differences into account. Performance on the two measures of psychological mindedness is found to be largely unrelated, suggesting that these are two different psychological skills. Implications of these findings are discussed, with special reference to education, peer counseling, and psychotherapy.

Development and Validation of a Measure of Interpersonal Strengths: The Inventory of Interpersonal Strengths

An Inventory of Interpersonal Strengths (IIS) was developed and validated in a series of large college student samples. Based on interpersonal theory and associated methods, the IIS was designed to assess positive characteristics representing the full range of interpersonal domains, including those generally thought to have negative qualities (e.g., introversion, coldness, submissiveness). The 8 subscales (octants) of the 64-item IIS demonstrated good circumplex features and reliability. Tests comparing Big 5 interpersonal factors, Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP), Battery of Interpersonal Capabilities (BIC), and other interpersonal measures demonstrated convergent and discriminant validity and shared interpersonal structure. The IIS accounted for significant additional variance in life satisfaction and quality of personal relationships beyond the IIP and the BIC.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Patient Version of the Working Alliance Inventory–Short Form Revised

The working alliance concerns the quality of collaboration between patient and therapist in psychotherapy. One of the most widely used scales for measuring the working alliance is the Working Alliance Inventory (WAI). For the patient-rated version, the short form developed by Hatcher and Gillaspy (WAI-SR) has shown the best psychometric properties. In two confirmatory factor analyses of the WAI-SR, approximate fit indices were within commonly accepted norms, but the likelihood ratio chi-square test showed significant ill-fit. The present study used Bayesian structural equations modeling with zero mean and small variance priors to test the factor structure of the WAI-SR in three different samples (one American and two Swedish; N = 235, 634, and 234). Results indicated that maximum likelihood confirmatory factor analysis showed poor model fit because of the assumption of exactly zero residual correlations. When residual correlations were estimated using small variance priors, model fit was excellent. A two-factor model had the best psychometric properties. Strong measurement invariance was shown between the two Swedish samples and weak factorial invariance between the Swedish and American samples. The most important limitation concerns the limited knowledge on when the assumption of residual correlations being small enough to be considered trivial is violated.

The practicum experience : A survey of practicum site coordinators

It has recently been acknowledged that more needs to be known about predoctoral practicum experience in professional psychology from the perspective of those who do the practicum training. This article reports the resultsof a survey completed by 263 predoctoral practicum sites in the United States and Canada. Information presented includes the distribution of sites where practicum training is currently taking place and the wide range of training opportunities occurring at diverse sites. Results indicate problems in communication between practicum sites and graduate programs, evidenced in a lack of awareness of graduate program expectations by practicum site coordinators. Recommendations to improve communication are provided.

Development and Validation of a 6-item Working Alliance Questionnaire for Repeated Administrations During Psychotherapy

Recently, researchers have started to measure the working alliance repeatedly across sessions of psychotherapy, relating the working alliance to symptom change session by session. Responding to questionnaires after each session can become tedious, leading to careless responses and/or increasing levels of missing data. Therefore, assessment with the briefest possible instrument is desirable. Because previous research on the Working Alliance Inventory has found the separation of the Goal and Task factors problematic, the present study examined the psychometric properties of a 2-factor, 6-item working alliance measure, adapted from the Working Alliance Inventory, in 3 patient samples (ns = 1,095, 235, and 234). Results showed that a bifactor model fit the data well across the 3 samples, and the factor structure was stable across 10 sessions of primary care counseling/psychotherapy. Although the bifactor model with 1 general and 2 specific factors outperformed the 1-factor model in terms of model fit, dimensionality analyses based on the bifactor model results indicated that in practice the instrument is best treated as unidimensional. Results support the use of composite scores of all 6 items. The instrument was validated by replicating previous findings of session-by-session prediction of symptom reduction using the Autoregressive Latent Trajectory model. The 6-item working alliance scale, called the Session Alliance Inventory, is a promising alternative for researchers in search for a brief alliance measure to administer after every session.

Considering the real relationship: Reaction to Gelso's “The real relationship in a postmodern world: Theoretical and empirical explorations”

Dr. Gelso’s work on the real relationship is a tribute to the vitality of the scientist-practitioner model. Gelso’s long clinical experience has convinced him of the importance of the real relationship in therapy and has led to the line of theory and research summarized in this issue. In his article, Gelso presents a mixed theoretical-clinical account of the real relationship followed by a summary of research based on his Real Relationship Inventory (RRI). His chief finding is that the RRI, when pitted against an alliance measure, accounts for additional variance in therapy outcome. Both these clinical data and the empirical results suggest he is on to something. What is it, and how can we best think about it? This brief critique focuses first on theory and then on measurement. Gelso’s theoretical approach to the real relationship continues a long tradition in psychotherapy research of partitioning the doings of therapy into multiple components. The most basic split is between technique and relationship. Gelso’s tripartite model of the relationship further breaks relationship into three components: alliance, real relationship, and transference. As long as we recognize that these are conceptual categories, that these are ways of looking at any given event, moment, utterance, attitude, exchange, and so on, this partitioning is fine. The problem comes when we begin to use these conceptual categories concretely. This component point of view leads us to see aspects of therapy in mutually exclusive categories, classifying specific events or actions as transference, technique, alliance, and so on. Perhaps this is understandable because we tend to think of these concepts in terms of exemplary instances, in which, for example, a focused effort is made to work on goals with the client, a specific technical move is made, or the therapist overtly expresses genuine appreciation for the client. So, for example, the classification ‘‘alliance’’ may be defined as overt efforts to engage the client in the work of therapy. Thus, activities intended to induce change in the client are technique; efforts to promote bonding, collaboration, or goal setting are alliance; attitudes and behaviors that are genuine and real are real relationship; and those that are distorted by past experience are transference. The component approach narrows our understanding of what is happening in therapy, which can be broadened by recognizing that any given activity, attitude, and so on in therapy serves multiple purposes and thus cannot, in general, belong in an exclusive category. I have been interested in this problem in the context of alliance (Hatcher & Barends, 2006), which also tends to get partitioned into specific alliance-directed attitudes or activities, separate from, for example, technique. This partitioning leads to such questions as whether technical activities or alliance activities are more influential, a question that has become a lively facet of the psychotherapy research literature. Take, for example, a 2005 qualitative study by Bedi, Davis, and Williams in which clients were asked to identify what their therapists did that most helped them feel allied and committed to the therapy. By a wide margin, they identified techniques as most helpful in this regard rather than activities classified by researchers as

The IIS-32: a brief inventory of interpersonal strengths.

The Inventory of Interpersonal Strengths (IIS–64; Hatcher & Rogers, 2009) is a 64-item self-report measure based on the interpersonal circle (Pincus & Gurtman, 2006) with 8 subscales, or octants, that measure positive interpersonal characteristics covering the full range of the interpersonal circle. The IIS–64 is a valid and psychometrically robust measure of positive interpersonal features. However, because assessment time is precious in many contexts, briefer instruments might be of considerable value. We report the development of a brief version of the IIS–64 that retains the strong measurement characteristics of the original. Nonparametric item response theory methods were utilized in conjunction with factor-analytic item selection procedures in the original IIS–64 derivation sample of 1,377 to derive a 32-item version of the IIS that best represented a circumplex structure. Circumplex structure was confirmed in an additional college sample (N = 956) and in a clinical sample (N = 496). Convergence with the IIS–64 was confirmed, as were alpha and test–retest reliability. Convergent validity was demonstrated with measures of the Big Five factors. The IIS–32 should prove to be a useful and flexible measure of interpersonal strengths.

Notes on the Path to Competence Comments on Ridley and Colleagues’ Major Contribution

Focusing on the challenges of training counseling psychologists, Ridley and colleagues offer in this issue a review and critique of microskills training, the dominant training model in counseling psychology graduate programs. Recognizing the role of higher order cognitive and affective functions in expert practice, they propose a hierarchical model of considerable complexity. In these comments, the author offers some thoughts about their model in light of the range of roles and interests that competency models serve, the definition of competence, and the idea of metacompetency.