Spanish adaptation of the Revised Helping Alliance Questionnaire (HAq-II)

The working or helping alliance is one of the most widely studied constructs in psychotherapy process research.

The aim of this study was to adapt the patient and therapist forms of the Revised Helping Alliance Questionnaire II (HAq-II-P and HAq-II-T, respectively) into Spanish.

The two measurement instruments were adapted through a systematic translation process, a pilot study and a clinical study. The psychometric properties were examined following the third psychotherapy session.

Mean scores on the Spanish-language HAq-II-P and HAq-II-T were high. The corrected item-total correlations for >94% of the items were >0.30. Cronbach's α values for internal consistency were 0.88 and 0.93, respectively. Correlations for convergent validity with the respective versions of the Spanish-language Working Alliance Inventory were 0.80 and 0.87, respectively. In terms of predictive validity, there was a significant correlation between HAq-II-T and the patients' residual gain scores on the Spanish-language Beck Depression Inventory after the tenth psychotherapy session.

These results are consistent with studies using the original English versions of the HAq-II.