Manual for transference work scale; a micro-analytical tool for therapy process analyses

BACKGROUND: The present paper is a manual for the Transference Work Scale (TWS). The inter-rater agreement on the 26 TWS items was good to excellent and previously published. TWS is a therapy process rating scale focusing on Transference Work (TW) (i.e. analysis of the patient-therapist relationship). TW is considered a core active ingredient in dynamic psychotherapy. Adequate process scales are needed to identify and analyze in-session effects of therapist techniques in psychodynamic psychotherapy and empirically establish their links to outcome. TWS was constructed to identify and categorize relational (transference) interventions, and explore the in-session impact of analysis of the patient-therapist relationship (transference work). TWS has sub scales that rate timing, content, and valence of the transference interventions, as well as response from the patient. METHODS: Descriptions and elaborations of the items in TWS are provided. Clinical examples of transference work from the First Experimental Study of Transference Interpretations (FEST) are included and followed by examples of how to rate transcripts from therapy sessions with TWS. RESULTS: The present manual describes in detail the rating procedure when using Transference Work Scale. Ratings are illustrated with clinical examples from FEST. CONCLUSION: TWS might be a potentially useful tool to explore the interaction of timing, category, and valence of transference work in predicting in-session patient response as well as treatment outcome. TWS might prove especially suitable for intensive case studies combining quantitative and narrative data. TRIAL REGISTRY NAME: First Experimental Study of Transference-interpretations (FEST307/95). Registration number: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT00423462. URL: http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00423462?term=FEST&rank=2. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12888-014-0291-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.