Incorporating Progress Monitoring and Outcome Assessment Into Counseling and Psychotherapy: A Primer

How do therapists know they are making a difference with their clients? Progress monitoring and outcome assessment (PMOA) measures are powerful tools that can provide feedback about short-term progress during counseling and psychotherapy as well as information about the overall amount of progress. Incorporating Progress Monitoring and Outcome Assessment into Counseling and Psychotherapy by Scott T. Meier helps clinicians, students, and researchers learn how to employ and interpret PMOA measures. A new generation of change-sensitive measures has begun to appear that are specially designed to function as PMOA tests. These instruments indicate when a client is not making progress and the mental health professional should consider altering the psychosocial intervention. Research has demonstrated that PMOA measures have the potential to significantly reduce the surprisingly high failure rates found in psychotherapy. Meier describes case studies that incorporate PMOA data, literature relevant to PMOA measurement, and examples of rater training for PMOA measures. Chapters explain how to administer and interpret PMOA data, evaluate the psychometric properties of PMOA measures, understand statistics and graphics employed with PMOA data, and employ PMOA data in supervision. This book will be valuable to mental health providers who use PMOA measures as well as graduate students in clinical, counseling, and school psychology.

About the Author :
Scott T. Meier is Professor in the Program in Counseling/School Psychology in the Department of Counseling, School, and Educational Psychology at University at Buffalo. His major research and teaching areas focus on psychological assessment and testing (particularly progress monitoring and outcome assessment), research methods (particularly program evaluation), and counseling and psychotherapy skills (particularly the integration of case conceptualization and assessment with intervention).

Review :
"Meier's Incorporating Progress Monitoring and Outcome Assessment into Counseling and Psychotherapy is a must-read for students attending clinical and counseling training programs and practitioners who want to practice responsibly by maximizing patient well-being. Its major accomplishment is to lay out the case for monitoring, necessary principles and procedures of monitoring, as well as its limitations. It is packed with both the science of monitoring and the clinical wisdom needed to turn this science into action on behalf of those who turn to mental health professionals." --Michael J. Lambert, PhD, Professor of Psychology and Susa Young University Professor, Brigham Young University, and Honorary Professor, School of Psychology, Queensland University "Dr. Meier is a pioneer in mental health counseling and psychotherapy. His work not only details the elements of effective counseling and intervention but also provides a concrete model for measuring therapeutic change in clients. This book is an excellent foundation for instructing practitioners interested in conducting defensible and empirically based client progress monitoring and outcome assessment." --James McDougal, PsyD, Director, School Psychology Program, State University of New York at Oswego "This book is essential reading for clinical practitioners and helping professionals. Why? Not only because Scott Meier writes with great precision and logic, or because the book is immensely practical; the real gift of this book is that it builds a long-needed bridge between clinical research and everyday clinical practice. No matter what your professional discipline may be, this book will help you do what we all need to do: successfully obtain crucial feedback from clients and consumers." -- John Sommers-Flanagan, PhD, Professor of Counselor Education, University of Montana, and author of Counseling and Psychotherapy Theories in Context and Practice