The association between pretreatment change and unplanned termination in family therapy

Pretreatment change has many theoretical and practical implications in the practice of solution-focused therapy. Despite the importance, the empirical evidence has been very weak. Clients at a university family therapy clinic completed the pretreatment questionnaire, and, following therapy, therapists identified whether termination was planned or unplanned. A logistic regression model revealed that clients' planned/unplanned. terminations could be predicted with 76% accuracy. The significant predictors were the number of sessions and a lack of pretreatment change. Using survival analysis to assess session-by-session dropout rates, it was found that clients without pretreatment change had significantly fewer sessions.