Clinical Psychology Commons^™

The Relationship Between Number Of Sessions And Client-Judged Outcome, Jay Athy

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Outpatient clients from a community mental health center were surveyed by questionnaire to examine the relationship between number of therapy sessions attended and client-judgments of therapeutic outcome. The results indicated that client-judgments of therapeutic benefit tended to be independent of length of therapy when the client-judgement is a global assessment of therapeutic benefit. Controls for mode of therapy, initial diagnosis, type of referral, and status of case yielded similar findings. The nature of these relationships was nonlinear with the possible existence of different zones of sessions that account for varying degrees of client-perceived success. It also appeared that clients evaluated …