Psychotherapy Research Projects

I tend to admit students who have interests in psychotherapy research related to common factors and processes across psychotherapy orientations and diagnoses. Also, I admit students interested in how common factors and processes transpire within one diagnosis or therapy approach (especially feminist-multicultural and humanistic approaches). Instead of conceptualizing therapy as sets of therapists' interventions, I am more intrigued with therapists' intentions in how they empower clients to generate change and with how clients utilize self-healing processes within therapy. I am interested in integrative psychotherapies and in understanding psychotherapy process and 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; Levitt, 2024). 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 and 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 studying issues related to psychotherapy integration and training. How does learning multiple orientations help or hinder therapists in training?

In addition, I am interested in working with incoming student on issues related to the development and use 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. It also may entail the study of how therapists use guidelines most effectively.

Finally, I'd be interested in a student who is wanting to further research on clients' experiences of psychotherapy outcome and examining the ways clients define success in psychotherapy. This may involve using or analyzing data using our CETS measure alongside of other measures and questions.