Every year journals publish hundreds of psychotherapy-evaluation articles showing that some treatment or other produced a positive change in the main outcome variable — something such as anxiety level or anger level. Often unclear is what types of changes the clients made that led to emotional changes. Potentially, clients can change (1) situations they enter, (2) their behavior, and (3) their thinking. To measure these types of changes, Nicola Schutte and I developed a brief measure of therapeutically induced change:

Therapeutically Induced Change Scale
Malouff and Schutte (2011)

For each of the three questions, please choose a number from the following response options and mark that number after the question.

Response options
1 = not at all
2 = slightly
3 = between slightly and moderately
4 = moderately
5 = between moderately and very much
6 = very much
7 = extremely

Questions
1. To what extent did [insert name of intervention] lead you to change your thinking (your attitudes, how you think, what you believe)? ___

2. To what extent did [insert name of intervention] lead you to change what you did or how you acted or behaved? ___

3. To what extent did [insert name of intervention] lead you to change some situation? ___

In addition to providing information relevant to processes involved in overcoming a psychological problem, the scale can potentially prompt responses that lead to valuable discussions between client and therapist. To validate the scale, we tested it with a total of 281 individuals who went through a psychological intervention and found that total scores on the scale (summing the three responses) were associated with level of involvement in the intervention and level of improvement in the target of the intervention. The results suggest that in general, more movement toward resolution of the original problem will occur when clients change the situations they enter, their behavior, and their thoughts.

Have you completed a psychological intervention, either to overcome a problem or to increase some positive characteristic such as positive affect? If so, you can complete the scale and explore what types of changes you made. What do you conclude? If you are doing better now than before the intervention, it may be that you have maintained changes in situations, behavior, or thinking.

The article:
Schutte, N. S., & Malouff, J. M. (2011). Development and Validation of a Brief Measure of Therapeutically-Induced Change. Behavioural and cognitive psychotherapy, 39(05), 627-630.

John Malouff, PhD, JD
Assoc Prof of Psychology