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The 13th annual conference of The Consortium for Psychoanalytic Research, Inc., “Therapeutic Action: Psychodynamic Aspects of All Psychotherapies” was held on February 26, 2006 in Washington, DC. J. Stuart Ablon, Ph.D. was the primary presenter. After Ablon's presentations, the audience participated in a mini-lab session, completing Psychotherapy Process Q-sets (PQS) that were compiled and statistically analyzed by Michelle Schottenbauer, M.A. who then presented the results to the audience. Finally, a panel consisting of Sheila Hafter Gray, M.D., Carolyn Gruber, D.S.W., and Jim Barnett, Ph.D. shared their formal responses to the presentations, which led into a lively discussion from the floor.
Ablon gave two presentations. The first was titled, “Therapeutic Action in Brief Psychotherapy.” During this presentation, he discussed the principles underlying the development of the Psychotherapy Process Q-sort (Q-sort) to the audience and described its usefulness in researching psychotherapy. The Q-sort, which allows researchers to quantify qualitative data, is a 100-item questionnaire to be filled out by an observer or participant in a psychotherapy session. Each item is given a number by the evaluator on a scale of 1 to 9 with 1 being least characteristic of the session, 9 being the most characteristic of the session and 5 being neutral or irrelevant to the session. Items have instructions and examples to assist the evaluator in distinguishing between uncharacteristic and irrelevant.
What makes the Q-sort unique is that the responses are forced into a normal distribution. This means that the evaluator is forced to put a certain number of items into the 1 category, a certain number into the 2 category, and so forth with the greatest number of responses going into the