Between-Session Change in Solution-Focused Therapy: A Replication
Abstract
This paper presents a replication of the Reuterlov, Lofgren, Nordstrom, Ternstrom, and Miller study (2000) on the stability of clients' descriptions of improvement during solution-focused therapy. Our replication confirmed that the great majority of clients who report improvements at the outset of a session tend to increase their answer to the scaling question at the end of the interview. We also confirmed Reuterlov et al.'s fnding that when clients begin the session without reporting improvements, they tend to not see improvements at the end of it, in spite of their therapists' best efforts to “deconstruct” their initial description. However, our findings are less clear-cut than those of the Swedish team, and suggest that in some occasions (37.5% in our study, as opposed to 13% in the original paper) deconstruction may pay off as a therapeutic strategy, helping clients who initially do not describe any improvements to see some at the end of the session. Therefore, we consider it premature to dismiss deconstruction as a useless therapeutic strategy, and suggest that more studies be done on the conditions under which it is most helpful.
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