Psychotherapy 101: Give clients homework that they care about

If you want your clients to do homework – and you so should – they will be more likely to do it if it fits with what they want to remember from your session. Sounds like the sort of self-evident truth that we shouldn’t need a study to tell us, right? Wrong! We are slow to learn, quick to forget and have tiny capacity working memories. We often need to be reminded of the obvious thing right in front of us while we’re being distracted by 1-percenter intriguing rabbit-hole ideas.

Alexandra Jensen and colleagues (2019) recently analysed data from 541 sessions from 41 clients receiving individual CBT delivered in private practice. The clients were given a feedback form at the end of their sessions that looked like this:

How efficient is that? They had researchers rate the congruence between the things the client wanted to remember (“take aways”) and the homework assignment, classified simply as “low”, “medium” and “high” (with 90% agreement), and they made these ratings without knowing the level of homework compliance.

Clinical implications: Ask the client what they want to remember about the session before you set the homework assignment.

This article is currently in press at Behavior Therapy. Go to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000578941930084X for the full article.

References

Jensen, A., Fee, C., Miles, A.L., Beckner, V.L., Owen, D., & Persons, J.B. (2019). Congruence of patient takeaways and homework assignment content predicts homework compliance in psychotherapy. Behavior Therapy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2019.07.005