Psychotherapy Research Projects

I tend to admit students who have interests in psychotherapy research related to common factors across psychotherapy orientations and diagnoses rather than on developing evidence within these categories. I tend to study how clients and therapists both bring to therapy their own sets of skills, ideas about problems, and ways of functioning in the world that facilitates their process of healing. Instead of conceptualizing therapy as sets of therapists' interventions, I am more intrigued with therapists' intentions in how they empower clients to generate change that is appropriate for them in their own contexts and with how clients understand and utilize these processes in their own self-healing processes. My research examines both clients’ internal experiences within psychotherapy sessions as well as therapists’ intentional processes as they work together to form strategies to solve problems. I am interested in integrative psychotherapies and the integration of constructivist, humanistic, and multicultural-feminist perspectives and how to understand psychotherapy outcome in a manner that reflects change across a variety of therapy approaches.

· Research on the quality of psychotherapy: This work focuses upon how clients experience psychotherapy and evaluate the quality of their therapy (see Levitt, Butler & Hill, 2006; Levitt, Pomerville & Surace, 2016). We have developed a new measure, the Clients’ Experiences of Therapy Scale (CETS). The measure has strong psychometrics and is innovative in that it offers a way to assess the types of changes that clients have indicated are most important to them within their reports on their experiences of psychotherapy. It assesses many goals of therapy that are not captured by traditional symptom and functional outcome measures, reflecting gains such as insight, relational connection, and self-direction. Using this measure can allow researchers to evaluate therapy more comprehensively and in a manner that reflects clients’ experiences of what is important to them about therapy.

· Likely upcoming projects: I am hoping that an incoming student in this area would become involved in furthering research on clients' experiences of psychotherapy outcome and examining the ways clients define success in psychotherapy. Depending on students' interests, this may involve using our CETS measure alongside of other measures and questions and/or by exploring the many ways that outcome and therapy quality can be understood across therapy orientations. It also might involve qualitative or mixed methods research on clients' in-therapy experiences.

In addition, I am interested in working with incoming student on issues related to the development of clinical guidelines for practice and the use of qualitative research in that effort. Projects in this area might involve considering an client population or issue and then using meta-analytic methods that will allow psychologists to integrate evidence of varied forms (quantitative, qualitative, process measure research) to create practice guidelines that are grounded in the entire research literature on a topic rather than a narrowed set of evidence.

Recommended reading

Levitt, H. M., Pomerville, A. & Surace, F. I. (2016). A qualitative meta-analysis examining clients’ experiences of psychotherapy: A new agenda. Psychological Bulletin. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/bul0000057

Wu, M. B., & Levitt, H. M. (2020, Online first). A Qualitative Meta-Analytic Review of the Therapist Responsiveness Literature: Guidelines for Practice and Training. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy.

Levitt, H. M. & Williams, D. C. (2010). Facilitating client change: Principles based upon the experiences of eminent psychologists. Psychotherapy Research, 20, 337-352. doi: 10.1080/10503300903476708.