Measuring Psychotherapy Supervisor Development:

Abstract

As a topic of inquiry, supervisor development (i.e., the process of growth that supervisors experience in actually becoming a supervisor) has received limited research attention. The absence of a theory-driven instrument, designed to assess supervisor can be seen as one reason for this. In this paper, we describe an initial effort to generate and validate a theory-driven scale-the Psychotherapy Supervisor Development Scale (PSDS)- that could be used to assess supervisor development. The results of our study led to an 18-item scale (a) that provided a total score (but no subscale scores) reflecting psychotherapy supervisor development, (b) that had good (alpha) reliability (.90), and (c) that discriminated between supervisors at different levels of experience. While further validation work on the PSDS is needed, our initial findings suggest that the scale possessed adequate (alpha) reliability, (content) validity, and could be used for research purposes (in stud...