The purpose of this study was to revise the Hill et al. (1981) Client Verbal Response Category System. The client behavior system (CBS), which includes 8 nominal, mutually exclusive categories, was created. Psychologists indicated that clients generally are more productively involved when engaged in cognitive-behavioral exploration, affective exploration, insight, and changes than in resistance, agreement, requests, and recounting. When the CBS was used to rate predominant client behavior in middle sessions of 8 cases of brief individual therapy, adequate interjudge agreement was found, with cognitive-behavioral exploration occurring most frequently. Client experiencing and client ratings of helpfulness differed across CBS categories, suggesting concurrent validity for the measure. In a second study, 9 interviewer queries elicited different interviewee behaviors in 39 structured interviews, providing evidence of construct validity.Lenore W. Harmon served as the action editor on this article.
To understand the interaction between counselors and clients, researchers need measures of client behavior. A measure of client behavior can aid in describing and evaluating client behavior, ascertaining the ways in which clients respond to counselor interventions, and assessing the ways in which clients change over the course of treatment.In considering the importance of client behavior in counseling and therapy, it is puzzling that a single measure or even a single type of measure has not emerged as the standard in the field. In measuring counselor behavior, in contrast, response modes have been widely accepted as a standard type of measure, with several different versions created by different researchers (cf. Elliott et al., 1987). In contrast, several different types of measures of client behavior, most of which were developed from single theoretical perspectives (e.g., client experiencing: Klein,
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