The Structure And Measurement Of Working Alliance

Working alliance has always been the important aspect of the process and outcome of psychotherapy research. Clinical researchers believe that working alliance is pivotal in establishing the therapeutic process and is crucial to the eventual outcome. The research of the working alliance has been studied for several decades, and it has already drawn many conclusions that can direct practice, but its structure is not clear and the measurement method is single, which has affected the process of psychological counseling to a certain extent.This study confirmed the suitable questionnaire of the working alliance for Chinese culture by exploring the structure of the working alliance questionnaires, introduced and verified the new measurement of the working alliance, and further clarified the structure of the working alliance. The measurement of working alliance domestic mostly uses the series of Working Alliance Inventory. WAQ is based on the actual situation of China and the work of exploring the working alliance in the eyes of Chinese clients (Zhu Xu &Jiang Guangrong, 2011c). Logically, WAQ should be more suitable for the Chinese cultural background than the foreign working alliance scale. The first study compared the structural validity of WAI-S, WAI-SR and WAQ, and obtained that WAQ was more suitable for Chinese cultural background and could measure working alliance effectively.The second study introduced a new tool for measuring the working alliance called joystick method. Joystick technology is superior to traditional questionnaire measurement of working alliance. It has many obvious advantages, like real-time,continuous, objective and so on. The second study formulated the Working Alliance Assessment Manual. The assessments of working alliance have higher consistency that more than 0.68. The third study explored the feasibility of the joystick method to measure the working alliance by the Working Alliance Assessment Manual, and to explore the structure of the working alliance. The results showed that the joystick method can be used to assess the working alliance and it had good reliability. The correlation of working alliance that assessed by joystick method and WAQ was significant. The total score of working alliance and the score of goal-task could predict counseling outcome.The working alliance included three dimensions: goal-task, bond and engagement.