The relationship between therapist-client modality similarity and psychotherapy outcome

Although disparate views have been published, the theory underlying multimodal therapy suggests that therapist-client similarity would be most advantageous for treatment outcome and client satisfaction. To explore this question, 19 different therapist-client pairs were followed over 12 sessions of psychotherapy. Clients were evaluated with the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) after sessions 1 and 12 to determine psychotherapy outcome. Similarity was determined by computing D" statistics on therapists' and clients' responses to the Structural Profile Inventory (SPI). Similarity on the SPI predicted psychotherapy outcome, showing a statistically significant relationship with the Global Severity Index of the BSI.