CLIENT AND THERAPIST VALUES IN RELATION TO DROP-OUT

Although since the 1980s a majority of therapists were found to believ e that values are embedded in psychotherapy (Garfield and Bergin, 1994 ), values are seldom a part of explicit interaction between client and therapist in clinical practice. One possible reason for the discrepan cy between the therapists' conviction and the actual clinical practice may be the lack of unequivocal results in research that deal with the relationship between client and therapist values and the outcome of p sychotherapy. So, although clinicians can recognize the importance of values, they still do not know what to do about them when faced with a client. This study investigated the impact of initial value dissimila rity and value similarity between client and psychotherapist on early drop-out rate in a clinical setting (N=78 dyads). Value dissimilarity is related to drop-out, in contrast to value similarity. The results s uggest that obvious value differences hinder the building of the thera peutic alliance as Kelly and Strupp (1992) suggested. A specific conse quence for clinicians is that they are faced with the task of bridging the gap between the client and themselves for those values that are t oo different. ((C) 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.).