Outcome Questionnaire-45 (OQ-45) Progress Alert Rates in Group Versus Individual Treatment: An Archival Replication

In a recent study involving routine outcome monitoring (ROM), Burlingame and colleagues (2018) found that the clients in group treatment yielded significantly more not-on-track (NOT) progress alerts during treatment compared to individual treatment. Additionally, nonequivalence was found in the timing of the first NOT alerts, with group treatment's first alerts occurring two sessions later than individual treatment. Because past research has generally demonstrated equivalence between the effects of individual and group therapy, the current study aims to determine whether these rate and timing differences are replicable. Without sufficient evidence that the NOT alerts' frequency and temporal patterns found previously are common across group therapies, we hypothesized that a new data source would show no difference between rate and timing of NOT alerts between group and individual therapy. Frequency and timing data of NOT alerts from archival Outcome Questionnaire administrations in a comparable counseling center (N = 5,639, M-age = 25.7, female = 58.4%. Caucasian = 78.4%) were analyzed and compared to Burlingame et al.'s (2018) results. The current study replicated the significant difference found in the rate of NOT alerts between treatment formats (p = .007). Additionally, the timing of NOT alerts created a more complex picture. Burlingame et al.'s (2018) results may be more common as preliminary results suggest that clients in group therapy are more likely to alert as NOT during the course of therapy when compared to clients in individual therapy. Implications of these findings are discussed.