Date of Award

2-9-2018

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)

Department

Graduate Department of Clinical Psychology

First Advisor

Celeste Jones, Psy.D.

Second Advisor

Brian Goff, Ph.D.

Third Advisor

Joel Gregor, Psy.D.

Abstract

The current study seeks to explore the impact of a therapist training on the Reflective Exploration of Parenting Interactions Tool (REPIT, Verona, 2015), a clinical, therapist-guided exercise that aims to improve parent insight, and in turn, facilitate a decrease in parent-child conflict. The REPIT was created as a therapy exercise in which parents are guided through a series of 19 standardized questions that build their insight into their own internal processes regarding conflict with their child. Specifically, the reflection encourages exploration of how the parental internal processes impact the parent-child relationship and interact with the child thought processes to create parent-child conflict. The purpose of this study is to develop a therapist training for the REPIT and determine appropriate training components, maximizing therapist learning while balancing training efficiency. Experimental and control groups are used, with both groups completing a pre- and post-training declarative knowledge measure. The experimental group underwent a 3-hour interactive didactic workshop, and the control group did independent review of written materials only.

The results suggest that both training methods were effective in demonstrating improvements in declarative knowledge of the REPIT, but that there were no significant differences in therapist proficiency between the training conditions. A primary limitation of the study was regarding construction of the outcome measure. Item analysis indicated that the items were low in difficulty, that some items did not discriminate low- and high-scorers adequately, and that not all of the items contributed to the overall test score significantly.

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