A scale for the measurement of client and therapist expressiveness

Abstract

In light of recent theoretical and empirical work that stresses the importance of both the client's and therapist's expressiveness for productive therapeutic process, an ordinal scale was developed and presented to assess levels of client and therapist expressiveness in the ongoing therapy interaction. Scale points were constructed on the basis of face validity and empirical findings with nominal classification systems for client and therapist expressiveness; they were defined in terms of stylistic features of language and voice quality. In addition to presenting reliability data that indicate that the scale can be used with considerable interrater agreement, a number of important questions were posed for future research on the client-therapist interaction.