While the comparison of client and therapist reasons for termination might shed light on their respective views of outcome and process, only one published study has examined directly the reasons given by therapist-client pairs. One barrier to such research is the absence of a systematic conceptualization of reasons for termination that incorporates both therapist and client perspectives. This article describes a comprehensive conceptualization, drawn from the existing literature, and applies a coding system based on that conceptualization to naturalistic clinical data from 123 therapist-client pairs in a psychology training clinic. Coders were able to categorize reliably open-ended client data into reasons for termination. For therapist and client data, the relationships between coding categories and participants' outcome ratings, generally were consistent with expectations, providing limited validation. Some support was found for concordance between therapist and client reasons, especially for those related to therapist or client departures, which were prominent in this setting. As expected, however, therapists were more likely than clients to endorse success as a reason for termination. Negative client feelings about therapy, including dissatisfaction, were reported infrequently as reasons for termination, and with little agreement between clients and therapists, but this may be due to methodological limitations.
Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R) scores of 209 undergraduate clients from a university-based psychology clinic were compared with those of 435 nonpatient undergraduates and with adult and adolescent norms. College student outpatients were similar to adult outpatients on the SCL-90-R. However, when compared with norms based on unscreened community samples, nonpatient undergraduates were, like adolescents, considerably more symptomatic than adults. Although nonpatient undergraduates were significantly less symptomatic than outpatient undergraduates, the two distributions overlapped considerably, which presents a high risk of misclassification. Comparison of the study samples with other published data supports the generalizability of these findings. The data's implications for the use of the SCL-90-R in evaluating symptomatology and the clinical significance of change in college students are discussed.The increasing use of measures of clinical significance for evaluating client status and change requires appropriate instruments with norms for both normal and pathological populations (Jacobson, Follette, & Revenstorf, 1984). Johnson, Ellison, and Heikkinen (1989) argued that the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R; Derogatis, 1994;Derogatis & Cleary, 1977;Derogatis, Lipman, & Covi, 1973), which is widely used for both clinical and research purposes (Beutler & Crago, 1983;Waskow & Parloff, 1975), could be useful for evaluating the psychological symptoms of university counseling center clients. Norms are available for the SCL-90-R for adult outpatients and inpatients as well as for populations of adults and adolescents labeled "nonpatient"; however, these nonpatient populations should more accurately be called "unscreened" because they did not exclude individuals who were cur-
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