Do Gender and Racial Differences Between Patient and Therapist Affect Therapeutic Alliance and Treatment Retention in Adolescents

By Matthew Wintersteen, Janell L. Mensinger, G. Diamond. 2005

235 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Parents, referral sources, and even therapists wonder whether the gender and racial match between therapists and patients contributes to poorer alliances and treatment dropout. Six hundred adolescent substance abusers andtheir therapists from a large randomized clinical trial were grouped according to matches and mismatches on both gender and race, and alliance ratings were collected from both patients and therapists. Results revealed that gender-matched dyads reported higher alliances and were more likely to complete treatment. Racial matching predicted greater retention but not patient-rated alliance. However, therapists in mismatched dyads rated significantly lower alliances. Results suggest that. although multicultural training remains critical, training emphasis should also be placed on understanding how gender and racial differences affect therapeutic processes.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a0f8cea372648e80b4ce0d59573044828765fa06

Citations in the corpus

• Working Alliance in Adolescent Outpatient Therapy: Youth, Parent and Therapist Reports and Associations with Therapy Outcomes (2008, unknown): “The WAI has also demonstrated adequate reliability and validity with youth therapy (e.g., Kazdin et al. 2005; Wintersteen et al. 2005 ).”