Psychometric Properties of the Turkish Working Alliance Inventory-Short Form

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Psychotherapy Research

Background:

• The therapeutic alliance is crucial for psychotherapy outcomes.
• Existing measures of the working alliance may not be optimally adapted for Turkish-speaking populations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a short form of the Turkish Working Alliance Inventory (WAI).
• To adapt Bordin's pan-theoretical conceptualization of the therapeutic alliance for Turkish clinical practice.

Main Methods:

• Confirmatory factor analysis was applied to a dataset of 83 psychotherapy sessions from 58 therapists and 83 patients.
• The analysis utilized short forms of the WAI based on previous methodological studies.
• Measurements from the third therapy sessions were used.

Main Results:

• Confirmatory factor analysis indicated good model fit for both therapist and patient versions of the WAI short forms.
• The short form proposed by Tracey and Kokotovic demonstrated superior statistical performance.
• The final WAI short forms achieved high internal consistency, with Cronbach's alpha of 0.90 for therapists and 0.86 for patients.

Conclusions:

• The developed WAI-Short Forms for therapists and patients exhibit acceptable reliability and validity.
• These validated forms are suitable for application in both clinical and research contexts within Turkey.
• The findings support the utility of the WAI-Short Forms for assessing therapeutic alliance in Turkish psychotherapy.