Christine Roufail, Psy.D.
Incoming Class of 2008
Internship: MercyFirst
September 2013 Conferral
Understanding Therapists’ Attitudes Towards Recording Therapy Sessions
Chair: Geoffrey Goodman, Ph.D.
Much of what is known regarding effective psychotherapy is due to the recordings of patient sessions (Miller, Yahne, Moyers, Martinez, & Pirritano, 2004; Milne, Baker, Blackburn, & Reichelt, 1999). However, within the health care setting, studies have found that fewer patients tend to consent to audio and video-recording sessions when discussing mental health issues (Themessl-Huber et al., 2008). There is research that identifies positive and helpful reasons for recording therapy sessions such as enhancement of supervision, client assessment, therapist self-supervision, research findings, and patient feedback sessions. No study has surveyed practicing psychotherapists on a breadth of different influences on their decision to record or not record sessions. The purpose of this quantitative study was to evaluate a diverse sample of practicing psychotherapists on their attitudes toward video-recording and audio-recording their psychotherapy sessions and circumstances that may potentially change their mind. It was hypothesized that therapists’ theoretical orientation, age, age of the population treated, and means of recording would influence their recording practices. We did not find statistically significant results except for tests of two exploratory hypotheses. There was a statistically significant negative correlation between the therapists’ years of experience and the value of protections afforded by signed consent forms to record sessions as circumstances that might change the therapists’ minds. In addition, there was a significant association between therapists who did and did not audio-record and therapists who did and did not video-record their therapy sessions. Nonetheless, future research should continue to explore the hindrances to recording therapy sessions. The knowledge that can be gained from understanding psychotherapists’ resistance to recording therapy sessions can be used to educate current psychotherapists and help future clinicians to benefit from recording their sessions.