Efectos de la competencia del terapeuta en el tratamiento de adolescentes con fobia social generalizada

The purpose of this study is to verify which part of the results of the Intervention Program for Adolescents with Social Phobia can be attributed to the level of competence of the therapist. We present the results of three experimental conditions (expert, quasi-expert and inexperienced), including 46 Spanish adolescents with a mean age of 15.37 years (SD= 1.04, range: 14-18). Most of the participants were female (67.40%) and were in 4th grade of ESO (46.70%). All of them met the criteria for diagnosis of Generalized Social Phobia. The results showed that (i) the effect size that could be attributed to therapists was low, (ii) the magnitude of the effect size obtained correlated with the magnitude of the expert level in the most sensitive variables to therapeutic change, and (iii) these results did not reach statistically significant differences among the three experimental conditions.

The data allow us to conclude that found to be relevant the impact of therapist competence on the results most of the variance in the results is directly related to the effect of manualized treatment program that has been implemented.