Data for "Helping the whole person: The development of the pluralistic therapy integrity scale"

These data were collected as part of A PhD thesis "Helping the whole person: The development of the pluralistic therapy integrity scale".

The studies were designed to obtain the experiences of therapists using pluralistic therapy in counselling sessions, and their understandings of the defining aspects of this form of therapy. Pluralistic therapy is based on a philosophy which posits that many different things can help clients at different times. Perhaps as a result, there is no defining set of principles which one would expect to observe in a pluralistic therapy session. Treatment integrity testing within psychotherapy is required to ensure that the therapy being tested is being delivered as intended. To test pluralistic therapy, it is first necessary to define it. Defining the underlying principles then allows for a flexible treatment integrity scale to be developed. The dataset comprises data from five studies.

For Study 1, members of the Pluralistic Practice Network (a network of counsellors who work with the pluralistic framework, mainly based in the UK) were sent a questionnaire and asked to complete it. A total of 43 practitioners responded of varying ages and experiences levels, rating the 11 items from the original Pluralistic therapy adherence scale (McLeod & Cooper, 2012, unpublished) for how key they believed them to be to pluralistic therapy. They also provided some free text responses to questions asking them for any techniques or principles they believed to be defining to working in a pluralistic way but which were not covered by the current adherence scale.

A second scale was developed for Study 2, based on the participant ratings from Study 1. Students on the pluralistic counselling Masters programme at Abertay University were asked to rate these items for how much they agreed they were crucial to pluralistic therapy, and also for the clarity of the wording of those items. A total of 28 participants responded, again of varying ages and levels of experience.

For Study 3, secondary data was analysed, from a questionnaire sent to Integrative therapists, including pluralistic therapists. A total of 186 therapists completed the online survey, with roughly half stating they used the pluralistic framework and half working integratively or eclectically. Participants were again from a range of ages and levels of experience, but only around half were based in the UK. The others were from other European countries, and some did not provide this data. The question analysed in this study asked participants to rate different pluralistic skills for how frequently they were used in practice. The answers were compared to discover what differentiated pluralistic therapy from other forms of integrative therapy.

Study 4 describes semi-structured interviews with seven pluralistic practitioners concerning the key areas of dissensus discovered in Studies 1-3. All of the participants were based in either Scotland or England, and some had trained in pluralistic therapy originally and some had come to work this way after training in and working with other modalities originally. They were asked to describe their experiences delivering pluralistic therapy, their opinions of some of the framework, and what they believed defined this way of working.

In the fifth study, the findings from the previous studies were put to both of the original developers of the pluralistic framework in online interviews. The broad purpose of this study was to discover Cooper and McLeod’s understanding of some key aspects of pluralistic therapy, and whether or not these had changed in the years since its inception.

The ratings data from the Studies 1 and 2 can be shared as open access datasets.

The long answer responses from Study 1, and the interview data from Studies 4 & 5 are closed datasets as they contain personal identifiable information. The studies have a small pool of participants from one form of counselling (pluralistic) and as such could potentially be identified from their answers, and therefore potentially any clients they may have.

The dataset from Study 3 cannot be shared as it is secondary data and permission was sought only to use the data for the PhD thesis and , not for sharing as an open access dataset.