Therapeutic alliance in status termination agreement, disagreement, no-show in couple therapy

The literature about couple therapy termination is ambiguous in the definition of "drop-out": drop out is the therapy ended with a various number of sessions, but it also depends on the therapist’s opinion, and so on. The termination status definition adopted for the study is: conclusion with agreement, when therapist and partners agree on the achievement of therapeutic goals; without agreement when the partners decide to interrupt therapy and they communicate this decision to the therapist; no-show when the partners don't come to their date, don't give any communication and therapist is unable to reach clients by phone or other means (Bartle-Haring, et al., 2012). The aim of this study is to explore therapeutic alliance in this three groups of termination status: differences in therapeutic alliance between groups, differences between subjects (men and women) in the same group and between groups, differences in the contributions of therapists between groups. The therapeutic alliance has been measured whit SOFTA-o (after Italian validation). The top ten sessions have been observed (the top ten and last session for therapies longer). At the time have been observed 198 sessions: 8 therapeutic processes of conclusions with agreement (88 sessions), 9 therapeutic processes of conclusions without agreement (50 sessions); 9 therapeutic processes of no-show conclusions (60 sessions). Results indicated statistically significant differences between groups for the shared sense of purpose (F: 9.5; α: .000), engagement of men (F: 5.4; α: .005) and emotional connection of men (F: 4; α: .02) and women (F: 6.2; α: .003) between the two groups of drop-out and “agreement”. There aren’t differences intra-groups. The groups of “without agreement” and “no-show” have a statistically significant difference only for the therapist's contributions in the dimensions of emotional connection (F: 19.1; α: .000) and safety (F: 3.1; α: 0.04).