Development of Psychotherapists: Concepts, Questions, and Methods of a Collaborative International Study

The aim of this international study is to examine the nature, correlates, and perceived determinants of development among professional psychotherapists from different countries and cultures at all career levels, trained in different professions and theoretical orientations. Psychotherapeutic development was conceptualized and assessed from several perspectives, including concurrent and retrospective reports by therapists and cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of therapists' practices and experiences. This paper presents the main questions guiding the study, defines its core concepts, introduces the survey instrument, describes data collection procedures, and reports descriptive and scale development data from a multinational data base of nearly 3800 therapists. Analyses provide evidence for the reliability and validity of direct and indirect measures of retrospected career development and currently experienced development, and their applicability to diverse groups of psychotherapists. Diese inernat...