Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Jan 25, 2022
Date Accepted: Mar 8, 2022
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Comparative study of the establishment of the therapeutic alliance in online and face-to-face psychological treatment.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of online mental health treatments have grown exponentially. Yet additionally, it seems inevitable that this technical resource is here to stay at health centres. However, there is still very little scholarly literature published on this topic, and therefore, the impact of the changes that have had to be dealt with in this regard has not been studied
Objective:
This study aims to evaluate the differences in the establishment of the Therapeutic Alliance (TA) based on the intervention modality (online or face-to-face), the type of attachment and diagnosis.
Methods:
Participants: A total of 291 subjects participated in the study, 149 of whom are men (51.2%) and 142 women (48.8%) between the ages of 18 and 30. Instrument: sociodemographic data, SOFTA-o (Escudero & Friedlander, 2001) and Relationship Questionnaire (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991).
Results:
The results show that the treatments conducted face-to-face obtain significantly better scores in the creation of the TA than those conducted online. The same holds true with attachment, in that users with secure attachment show a better TA than those with insecure attachment, although there were no significant differences with the diagnosis, age and sex.
Conclusions:
We believe that professionals are not yet prepared to conduct remote treatment with a degree of efficacy similar to face-to-face. It is essential for professionals to get training in this new technical resource and to understand and incorporate the variants it entails into their daily practice.
Citation
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Copyright
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