An Investigation of Clinically Significant Change among Child and Adolescent Clients of a Graduate-Level Training Clinic

The study investigated client outcome data for child and adolescent clients seen for outpatient psychotherapy services by graduate-level student therapists in a psychology training clinic in order to better understand change trajectories occurring in such settings and to examine whether services being offered are meaningful for youth clients. One hundred sixty-nine clients seen by graduate-level therapists at a training clinic setting were evaluated at each session using the Youth-Outcome Questionnaire 2.01 in order to identify the percentage of clients who met criteria for clinically significant change, reliable improvement, no change, or deterioration in outcomes across the course of treatment. Approximately 24% of clients seen for treatment met criteria for clinically significant change at the termination of treatment and 34% reliably improved. Survival analyses indicated the median time required to attain clinically significant change was 18 sessions, with 10 sessions required for reliable improvement. Current findings are compared to earlier investigations in youth psychotherapy outcomes and training clinic outcomes. The implications of these findings for education and training, client care and clinical services, and policy are discussed