Preferences in Therapist-in-Training Journal Psychotherapy/Theory, Research, and Training, Vol 43(1), Spring 2006. pp. 111-118. Anthony Teasdale, and Clara Hill is a study dealing with 132 therapists- in -training preferences of clientele in future therapy sessions. This study was primarily conducted to reveal any unforeseen biases a prospective therapist may possess while selecting a client. To achieve this, Hill & Teasdale emailed a total of 419 doctoral students questionnaires regarding their preferences in clientele. The questionnaires themselves are based on a basic (1-5 point Likert scale) on sixteen preference-based variables. From their findings, they concluded that the therapists-in-training show a statistically significant preference
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Understandably, they are measuring the types of bias each therapist collectively. However, they could compare and contrast the differences in bias with non-psychology majors, or even non-college educated individuals. Could their bias of psychological likeness be attributed to extraneous factors such as education level, or implicit arrogance of being educated? In Teasdale’s and Hill’s defense, they would have to go through the trouble of designing a correspondingly valid version of the questionnaire for the non-psychology /non-educated students. Nevertheless, by having a control group, it enables Teasdale and Hill to further refine their results by limiting erroneous variables with additionally having a control group to compare …show more content…
In most cases the Likert scale is very effective when dealing ordinal ranges low to high/high to low. However, there are some cases in which the Likert scale is inappropriate. Let’s say a possible questionnaire item in this experiment read, “Rate your level of income 1=low 5=high.” If this is the case with Hill and Teasdale’s experiment, the participant’s responses could potentially be subjectively inaccurate. One participant’s “high income” level could be another’s “low” and vice versa. If they wanted to use a Likert scale correctly in this study, they will have to clearly define a range of which income levels are high, average and low. By doing this, they can do a better job at accurately gauging one’s socioeconomic
Understandably, they are measuring the types of bias each therapist collectively. However, they could compare and contrast the differences in bias with non-psychology majors, or even non-college educated individuals. Could their bias of psychological likeness be attributed to extraneous factors such as education level, or implicit arrogance of being educated? In Teasdale’s and Hill’s defense, they would have to go through the trouble of designing a correspondingly valid version of the questionnaire for the non-psychology /non-educated students. Nevertheless, by having a control group, it enables Teasdale and Hill to further refine their results by limiting erroneous variables with additionally having a control group to compare …show more content…
In most cases the Likert scale is very effective when dealing ordinal ranges low to high/high to low. However, there are some cases in which the Likert scale is inappropriate. Let’s say a possible questionnaire item in this experiment read, “Rate your level of income 1=low 5=high.” If this is the case with Hill and Teasdale’s experiment, the participant’s responses could potentially be subjectively inaccurate. One participant’s “high income” level could be another’s “low” and vice versa. If they wanted to use a Likert scale correctly in this study, they will have to clearly define a range of which income levels are high, average and low. By doing this, they can do a better job at accurately gauging one’s socioeconomic