The Psychometric Properties of the Turkish Form of the Therapeutic Alliance Observational Coding System (TPOCS-A)

Address for Correspondence: Assoc. Prof. Sibel Halfon, İstanbul Bilgi University, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Department of Psychology, Santralistanbul 34060 Eyüpsultan / İstanbul E-mail: sibel.halfon@bilgi.edu.tr Therapeutic Alliance (TA) is an umbrella term referring to a number of interpersonal processes that take place in psychotherapy. Presently, most definitions of TA in youth psychotherapy focus on the affective and collaborative aspects of the patient–therapist relationship outlined by Bordin (Elvins & Green, 2008). Bordin (1979) identified three dimensions of TA, which are bond, referring to the affective aspects of the patient–therapist relationship, task constituting agreement and participation in the activities of therapy and finally mutual consensus on goals in treatment. Even though the allianceoutcome association has been well established in adult psychotherapy with over 200 studies (Flückiger, Del Re, Wampold, & Horvath, 2018), when it comes to the field of child psychotherapy, the most recent meta-analysis by Karver, Nadai, Monahan and Shirk (2018) found only 28 studies that used an explicit measure of TA, which revealed a small to medium effect consistent with the adult TA literature and with prior youth meta-analyses (McLeod, 2011; Shirk & Karver, 2003). The number of studies is limited because research on youth alliance-outcome associations is relatively new compared to adult psychotherapy and there are few empirically validated measures. There is no gold standard for therapeutic alliance measurement in youth psychotherapy. Observer-rated methods are considered to be a more reliable method for assessing therapeutic alliance since they are not subject to youth’s varying ability to self-report on the relationship (Shirk & Karver, 2003). The Therapy Process Observational Coding System for Child Psychotherapy – Alliance Scale (TPOCS-A; McLeod & Weisz, 2005) is based on independent evaluators’ ratings of actual therapy sessions and has been found to have good psychometric properties in past studies (McLeod & Weisz, 2005). To the author’s knowledge, there is no empirically validated measure of therapeutic alliance for child psychotherapy that has been adapted to Turkey. The aim of this study was to investigate the psychometric properties of the Turkish form of TPOCS-A with a group of children in psychodynamic play therapy.