Different clinical perspectives of good and poor therapy sessions

This study investigated differences in causal attributions made by student clinicians taking actor and observer roles in good and poor therapy sessions. One hundred thirty-four graduate student clinicians in speech-language pathology were asked to imagine a hypothetical good or poor therapy session in which they took either the role of a clinician working with a client in a session or that of a clinician observing the session. To account for the session's hypothesized outcomes, clinicians taking the actor role cited client causes more frequently than other causes while clinicians taking the observer role cited clinician causes. These results are consistent with the actor-observer bias documented extensively in the psychological and educational literatures. Clinicians' causal attributions also differed for good and poor therapy sessions. Implications are discussed in terms of possible impact on the clinical training process in speech-language pathology.