Does practice always make perfect? A study of whether psychotherapists treating older adults become more efficient as they gain more experience

Psychotherapy is regarded as a highly efficient treatment across many different types of psychological disturbances. In most arenas of life, practice tends to improve performance considerably. Surprisingly, this does not generally seem to be the case for psychotherapists. For some reason, they do not appear to improve in terms of efficiency as time goes by - at least not unless they deliberately attempt to improve. To our knowledge, the effects of practice has not yet been studied in psychotherapists working with older clients. The current study intends to investigate the effects of practice on the outcome of psychotherapy for elderly persons. It will follow 4 psychologists for the first 2 years of their professional lives to explore whether increased practice leads to better outcomes for their clients. The clients consist primarily of elderly persons above the age of 65, who receives psychotherapy to improve their overall well-being and lower feelings of anxiety and depression. Regression analyses are planned with outcome improvement functioning as the dependent variable, calculated as pre-treatment scores subtracted from post-treatment scores. To account for individual differences in skill, the dependent variable is mean centered for each psychologist. The independent variable is the chronological rank for each client for each psychologist. As the investigated psychotherapists work within a deliberate therapeutic praxis, which utilizes systematic outcome monitoring, we expect to find a significant, but small, effect of practice on the outcome of treatment.