An examination of the Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity code.

This study examines the reliability of the Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI) code, a brief scale designed to evaluate the integrity of the use of motivational interviewing (MI). Interactions between substance abuse counselors with one person role-playing a client were audiotaped and scored by trained teams of graduate and undergraduate students. Segments of 10 minutes and 20 minutes were compared and found to yield the same reliability and integrity results. Interrater reliability showed good-to-excellent results for each MITI item even with undergraduate raters. Correlations between items showed a coherent pattern of interitem correlations. The MITI is a good measure of treatment integrity for MI and seems superior to existing measures when indicators of client behavior are not needed.

Augmenting continuing education with psychologically focused group consultation: Effects on adoption of group drug counseling.

This study examines whether adding psychologically focused group consultation to a standard 1-day continuing-education workshop on Group Drug Counseling (GDC), a group therapy with evidence of effectiveness in the treatment of substance abuse problems, improves GDC adoption. Counselors who had taken a 1-day workshop were randomly assigned to an 8-week course of group consultation that met for 1.5 hr per session (n = 16) or to no additional contact (n = 14). The group consultation used Relapse Prevention and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy principles to help participants overcome psychological barriers to the adoption of GDC. Results showed that the 1-day workshop resulted in attempts by trainees to implement the new therapy, but that the consultation condition maintained significantly higher levels of adoption and 2- and 4-month followups. Additionally, those in the group consultation condition reported a higher sense of personal accomplishment at the 4-month followup. These findings suggest that empirically supported psychotherapy models can be used to decrease clinicians' psychological barriers to adoption of evidence-based psychotherapy methods. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).