A STUDY OF THERAPEUTIC ALLIANCE IN EMOTIONALLY-FOCUSED MENTORING

Abstract

This honors thesis project focused on assessing the therapeutic alliance (TA) between mentors (securely attached upperclassmen) and mentees (insecurely attached first-year college students) who were enrolled in a newly developed Emotionally-Focused Mentoring (EFM) program. Undergraduate research assistants were trained as raters to observe the relationship between mentees and mentors and efficaciously assess the strength of the TA. Raters completed this process by listening to the first thirty minutes of the last EFM session (week 5) through audio- recordings and coding these observations using an 11-item scale via Qualtrics that measures TA. In addition, self-reported closeness from the participants was assessed. Overall, these findings indicate that the raters were reliable in their assessment of TA and adequately captured true score variance in TA across the participants within the study. The overall average measures ICCs ranged from .31 to .83 for the 11 items. I also evaluated the extent to which the mean of all the coded items from the five raters was itself a reliable composite scale; the mean TA composite was highly reliable (α = .94). Coded TA was also associated with greater reductions in participant’s attachment insecurity, but these effects were driven largely by the influence of a single outlier.