Therapy goals in inpatient psychotherapy: differences between diagnostic groups and psychotherapeutic orientations

Abstract

Many studies have suggested the importance of therapy goals for the treatment process, especially in a multi-professional treatment context such as inpatient psychotherapy. However, only very few studies have examined differences between various groups of patients with regard to their respective treatment goals. Using a previously developed system for the categorization of therapy goals based on computer-assisted, qualitative data analysis, we have extracted 7157 therapy goals from a sample of 1192 discharge reports of treatment periods from inpatient psychotherapy in Germany. To test the inter-rater reliability of the system, a sample of 400 randomly chosen goals was classified by two independent raters. Logistic regression analysis was used to test whether different goal areas prove to be of different predictive value with regard to the respective dependent variables (diagnostic groups, psychotherapeutic orientations). Inter-rater reliability ranged between 0.73 and 0.82. Results of using the logistic regression model indicate that the selection of certain goal categories predicts affiliation to specific diagnostic groups and psychotherapeutic orientations. The resulting odds ratios vary between 1.2 and 16. These findings can be used for a more individualized treatment planning and outcome measurement in inpatient psychotherapeutic treatment. However, there are also goal categories that do not differentiate and therefore need to be further investigated. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.