Abstrak
Practicing clinicians realize that patients' dropping out of therapy is detrimental to treatment outcome and can prove costly to psychotherapists in terms of financial and personal consequences. Two procedures to prevent therapy dropout were tested in the "real-world," naturalistic environment of a health maintenance organization (HMO). Whereas video preparation significantly reduced dropout, opportunity to estimate treatment duration did not. Results were obtained from 125 randomly assigned adult outpatients. Findings suggest that psychologists in clinical and administrative positions may experience reduced dropout rates by providing new patients with videotaped instructional material about what they might expect in the psychotherapy process.
