Peter Stratton

University of Leeds · Leeds Institute of Health Sciences (LIHS)

Current literature presents a gap in family functioning assessment instruments directed to children. The Child Systemic Clinical Outcome and Routine Evaluation (C‐SCORE) is a self‐report instrument, based on the original SCORE‐15, that measures different aspects of family functioning from the child's perspective. This study aims to explore the psyc...

This Handbook compiles 32 chapters covering accounts of the ways that systemic trainers, practitioners and researchers have undertaken manualisation of their therapies. There is a wide range of strongly held views about therapy manuals in systemic family therapy field ranging from an enthusiastic welcoming of the opportunities they afford to a deep...

Uses the Leeds systemic therapy manual to illustrate creating a manual through a full research process. The manual is described and general issues of manualisation are discussed.

The purpose of the current study was to examine the validity and reliability of the fifteen-item Systemic Clinical Outcome and Routine Evaluation (SCORE-15) Turkish version. The suggested three-factor structure was confirmed with a total sample of 327 participants including both community and clinical samples. The results of factorial invariance te...

We are writing this story of Human Systems with excitement and an eye to the future. Rudi Dallas and Becky Stancer took on the editing of the Journal but also joined with Peter Stratton and Helga Hanks in looking for a new base for the Journal. They succeeded in having Sage Publications include the Journal in their publications in internet form wit...

Objectives: The article presents the results of a research project on the evaluation of changes during the process of systemic family therapy in a clinical group comprising adolescent psychiatric patients. Methods: The evaluation was conducted using Polish version of the SCORE-15 tool. The analysis was performed on a sample of 109 families who c...

Issues of measurement and evidence of therapeutic effectiveness, and how these are exacerbated when data crosses cultural boundaries, are discussed. Widely used measures are reviewed, and two that have been more recently developed and employed in a wide variety of cultural contexts are selected for detailed consideration. The SCORE and the Outcome...

Issues of measurement and evidence of therapeutic effectiveness, and how these are exacerbated when data crosses cultural boundaries, are discussed. Widely used measures are reviewed, and two that have been more recently developed and employed in a wide variety of cultural contexts are selected for detailed consideration. The SCORE and the Outcome...

This chapter describes Clinical and Research Experiences Across Europe Using the SCORE as an Indicator of Family Functioning and is based on the symposium with that title in the International Systemic Research Conference, Heidelberg, 2017. The crucial importance of being able to report the outcomes of systemic couple and family therapies (SCFT) is...

The Systemic Clinical Outcome and Routine Evaluation (SCORE) is one of the most effective evaluation instruments to assess family functioning and to test family therapy results. To determine its applicability in the Portuguese context, we analysed the psychometric characteristics of the short (SCORE-15) and long (SCORE-28) versions using a combined...

en This paper reviews a decade of research (2006–2016) on a family assessment instrument called the Systemic Clinical Outcome and Routine Evaluation (SCORE). The SCORE was developed in Europe to monitor progress and outcome in systemic therapy and has been adopted by the European Family Therapy Association as the main instrument for assessing the o...

Presentiamo, in questo articolo, le evidenze attualmente disponibili per la terapia sistemica della coppia e della famiglia (TSCF). Viene riportato un gran numero di meta-analisi e di revisioni sistematiche recenti, che portano tutte a delle conclusioni largamente positive sull’efficacia generale di questo approccio. Vengono poi individuate 72 cond...

EFTA is a unique organisation which brings together in its three chambers the leading national family therapy organisations of each of around 30 European countries (with more than 50,000 family therapists throughout Europe), 125 of the training institutes of around 30 countries and 1100 individual member practitioners of high standing (2016). It wo...

In this final chapter we use the inspiration from the 12 chapters to suggest five areas in which we see family therapy and systemic practice developing. We juxtapose a selection of material from the reports of original developments in our chapters under these headings to draw out the connections between them. The headings are: The political context...

The founding volume of the European Family Therapy Association book series presents new ideas confirming the crucial importance of systemic family therapy for family practice. Spanning paradigms, models, concepts, applications, and implications for families as they develop, experts in the field demonstrate the translatability of session insights i...

Systemic family therapy has been very selective in the uses it has made of advances in systemic thinking in other areas such as organisational management, ecology, and evolutionary biology. There are exciting developments in current Systemic Sciences that offer new possibilities for the systemic basis of family therapy. I introduce specific example...

This study reports on the validity of the 15-item Portuguese version of the Systemic Clinical Outcome Routine Evaluation (SCORE-15; Vilaça, Silva, & Relvas, 2014), a brief and comprehensive measure of family functioning. Previous studies with SCORE-15 show that this version replicates the three-factor solution found for the original English version...

SCORE-15 is a self-report measure developed for systemic approaches to therapy. This article describes a pilot study designed to test the reliability and content validity of the original SCORE-15 for lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) adults in the UK. Quantitative data analyses conducted with an LGB sample (n = 59) and a non-LGB sample (n = 57) found...

Meta-analyses of randomized control trials include only a small proportion of the published outcome research of Couple and Family Therapy. This paper surveys the ranges of published research through a systematic review of the outcome studies of family, couple, and systemic therapies published in English language peer reviewed journals in years 2000...

The Systemic Clinical Outcome and Routine Evaluation (SCORE) Index of Family Function and Change is a recently developed outcome measure. It was designed to be acceptable to adults and children aged 12 and over. Thus far no research has been conducted using the SCORE in children under the age of 12. The aim of this study was to pilot a children's v...

The SCORE index of family functioning and change is an established measure, with strong psychometric properties, of the quality of family life. We report the sensitivity to therapeutic change of the short form, the SCORE-15. Data are reported from 584 participants aged above 11 years, representing 239 families. All couples and families had been ref...

In sketching the position of couples and family therapy and systemic practice in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the UK) we have provided what we can of the development of the contexts of training and practice; the content of some of the theories and their applications; and the external realities within which we currently...

In this study a 29-item version of the systemic clinical outcome and routine evaluation (SCORE), which contained all items from the SCORE-15 and SCORE-28, was used to develop norms for both the 15 and the 28 versions of the SCORE from the same sample. In a random digit dialling telephone survey, a stratified national random sample of 403 adults liv...

Background: Two current trends are making it increasingly important for counsellors and psychotherapists to be more engaged with research. Evidence of effectiveness is being increasingly demanded by those who fund our therapies and also by our clients. Meanwhile therapy research is offering practicable ways for therapists to improve their practice....

Evidence converges from a wide range of contexts to suggest that the causal beliefs held by an individual, or predominant in a group of individuals, are of considerable practical significance and theoretical interest. A good system for analysing naturally occurring expressions of causal belief would provide the possibility of testing and exploring...

This article reports on the recent government initiative of 2007–2010 to delineate, for the major forms of psychological therapy, expected professional standards of practice and conduct in workplaces (the national occupational standards) and to specify expected levels of competent practice (the competences). The article focuses on the processes and...

These tables present the result of a systematic collation of empirical studies of outcomes over 10 years of English language publication in refereed journals. The Review is intended to be a resource for practitioners and researchers, as a readily available source of recent research publications on specific conditions. For this purpose a description...

There is a need for a measure of outcome in systemic family and couples therapy (SFCT) that reflects current theory and practice. To meet the needs of SFCT practice the measure needs to use self-report by family members, take a short time to complete and be easy to understand. The development of such a measure, called the SCORE, is reported in this...

This article describes the development, in an Irish context, of a three-factor, twenty-eight-item version of the Systemic Clinical Outcome and Routine Evaluation (SCORE) questionnaire for assessing progress in family therapy. The forty- item version of the SCORE was administered to over 700 Irish participants including non-clinical adolescents and...

The use of metaphor as a tool to uncover people's ideas, attitudes, and values through analysis of discourse is demonstrated and illustrated with data collected in a social science research project. A “discourse dynamics” approach to metaphor situated within a complexity/dynamic systems perspective is developed. This approach is turned into a metho...

This paper is based on a workshop given at the EFTA/TIC Conference in Rhodes 2006. Our objectives are to encourage reflections on the various ways that training can foster a positive appreciation of research. We describe aspects of the research training in Leeds to indicate how it capitalises on systemic approaches to learning and change, while bui...

The contention of this article is that systemic family therapy has much to gain from a realistic appraisal of its research base, which is as positive as possible. And that through such an appraisal we can find ways of developing the scope of family therapy to the benefit of the profession and thereby, of our clients. Family therapy will benefit if...

There is a widespread perception among family therapy trainees and practitioners of research as an alien activity. This perception is both damaging and unnecessary. Exercises to enhance the relationship of trainees to research were conducted in stages. Concepts of dialogically constructed selves were introduced, and exercises explored the trainees'...

Provides an account of developing issues in Psychological therapies

Working with families, especially in areas such as child abuse, throws up many situations that can be viewed as crises requiring urgent action. The sense of urgency can increase when attempts to protect children are met with denial and obstruction. In reviewing our experiences over more than 30 years we have come to recognize that being organized b...

Working with families, especially in areas such as child abuse, throws up many situations that can be viewed as crises requiring urgent action. The sense of urgency can increase when attempts to protect children are met with denial and obstruction. In reviewing our experiences over more than 30 years we have come to recognize that being organized b...

Family therapy is under increasing pressure to use 'objective' measures of effectiveness, but there are strong voices in the field objecting to such research. The primary objective of this project was to investigate the acceptability and perceived potential usefulness of a short self-report questionnaire. A secondary objective was to explore the vi...

Blaming events in therapy were used as a focus for discussions with family therapists in order to examine their construal of the therapeutic process when working with families who blame. Interview transcripts were used as data and this was analysed using a qualitative methodology, with a view to building a theoretical model. We present an explorato...

There is a ‘shortfall in numbers of highly skilled qualitative researchers’ says the Economic and Social Research Council (2004). What is psychology doing about it? The Society’s revised syllabus (BPS, 2002) states that students should be able to collect and analyse qualitative (non-numerical) data. The Quality Assessment Agency (QAA, 2002) also sp...

Family therapy has enthusiastically taken up certain concepts for adult education but has not benefited from the full range of ideas that are now both available and compatible with current epistemologies. Good practice in formulating learning objectives is discussed and the objectives of this article are specified. Areas of psychology that are rele...

Traducción y adaptación al español del Manual de Terapia Familiar Sistémica desarrollado por la Universidad de Leeds. Esta traducción y adaptación fue realizada como parte de mi trabajo para obtener el título profesional de Psicólogo en la Universidad de Chile, en el año 2004.

To investigate the attributions offered spontaneously during interview by patients who have delusional beliefs. Specifically, to assess whether people with delusional beliefs reason in a way that is analysable. If so, to extend the findings from previous research to provide a detailed picture of the patients' accounts that could inform cognitive th...

The Darlington Family Assessment System (DFAS) is based upon the principles of multisystem-multimethod (MSMM) assessment. In practice it consists of a structured family interview with an integrated rating scale, a number of self-report questionnaries, and a task with an integrated behaviour coding system. This article summarizes the results of a se...

Developmental psychology offers much of value to family therapists in both its concepts and its information about child and adult development. Current work is reviewed selectively to emphasize those aspects which are most relevant for family work. The material is organized under five headings: ‘Theories’; ‘Major current issues’; ‘Developing capabil...

Determining the efficacy of therapeutic interventions is becoming an increasing political and ethical necessity. Comparative therapeutic outcome trials are most powerful when there is a precise specification, or manualization, of the forms that therapies took. Manuals have begun to be developed for structural/behavioural family therapy and couple t...

The way that responsibility is attributed and blame is expressed and apportioned in families is a crucial but rather neglected issue for family therapy. A case is made for analysing causal attributions as a way to gain a better understanding of these processes. The Leeds Attributional Coding System (Stratton et al., 1988) was used to analyse all th...

A powerful route to understanding communication within the family is provided by identifying and coding the causal attributions they make during family therapy sessions. The analysis of attributions of responsibility reported in the first of these linked papers (Stratton, 2003) is here extended to explore the accounts given by biological, step- and...

The way that responsibility is attributed and blame is expressed and apportioned in families is a crucial but rather neglected issue for family therapy. A case is made for analysing causal attributions as a way to gain a better understanding of these processes. The Leeds Attributional Coding System (Stratton et al., 1988) was used to analyse all th...

[PROJECT SUMMARY - FIRST PARAGRAPH] In brief, we wanted to develop the student guidelines that we had already drafted in our department, mainly by listening to colleagues and identifying areas of best practice. In addition, we wanted to hear students talk about their experiences of supervision and their recommendations for improving quality. Our ai...

The manual for systemic family and couple therapy developed in Leeds Family Therapy and Research Centre. Reported in Pote, H., Stratton, P., Cottrell, D., Shapiro, D & Boston, P (2003) Systemic Family Therapy can be manualised: Research process and findings. Journal of Family Therapy. 25, 236-262.

The final section of the Leeds Systemic Family Therapy Manual , the Therapist Adherence Protocol which enable users to check how closely they are following the procedures of the manual.

Steve Allison and Amaryll Perlesz review a systemic family therapy manual developed at the Leeds Family Therapy and Research Centre. Responding to the critique, Helen Pote gives an account of the manual's history, and its reception in the UK.

The aim of this study was to further understanding of blame in systemic therapy. Five families were chosen by their therapeutic team as engaging in blaming of a kind that the therapists found difficult to work with. Couples from each of the five families participated. A video extract from therapy identified by therapists as typifying blaming within...

The first step in the prevention of child abuse is to understand why it occurs. Preventative action can be wasted if effort is directed to the wrong targets. This chapter considers the etiology of child maltreatment and the wide range of causal agents that have been invoked to explain why children may be physically abused or neglected. Such factors...

Much of the previous research into the processes involved in food choice has made use of methodologies that neglect the social and familial context in which such decisions are made. The study reported here used a different approach to gather qualitative data from family members regarding their decision processes in the form of naturally expressed s...

This paper uses the Theory of Planned Behaviour to aid understanding of compliance with drug treatment for psychiatric problems using a prospective design. Compliance over a nine-week period was explained by intentions and perceived behavioural control (38.1% variance explained). Intentions to comply with the drug regimen was explained by attitudes...

Any attempt to influence children’s choice of food will only succeed if it deals realistically with all of the relevant factors. This chapter first specifies the scope that an understanding of food choice must cover, then presents some of the major findings from our studies in the area. These findings are used as a framework for a broader considera...

Despite claims that beliefs held by abusive parents are important indicators of family functioning, few studies have explored the relationship between patterns of beliefs and severity of abuse. This study applies findings from marital research that demonstrate that maladaptive attributional patterns predict the level of distress experienced in adul...

To find out whether routine counselling improves psychological wellbeing after bereavement for fetal abnormality. A randomised trial among bereaved couples who did not demonstrate any unexpected strain or psychopathology after bereavement. St. James's University Hospital, Leeds. Fifty-seven couples. Independent counselling by an experienced psychot...

This paper examines the psychoanalytic concept of countertransference in relation to systemic family therapy. Using clinical examples from their practice at the Leeds Family Therapy and Research Centre, the authors demonstrate how they have been able to make creative use of their own countertransference reactions in their work with families. Contra...

This study employed the Leeds Attributional Coding System to investigate causal attributions in the families of two groups of adolescent patients with End-Stage Renal Failure—one well adjusted (n=11) and one poorly adjusted group (n=11). Previous research with the chronically ill suggested that better adjustment would be associated with more extern...

The purpose of the investigation was to compare causal attributions made by families attending a therapy clinic with those made by control families in interview. Attributional statements were extracted from transcripts of ten therapy sessions and ten control interviews, and coded according to a system described in Stratton et al. (1986). In order t...

It is in the nature of systems consultation that we are presented with a complex and intricately structured mass of information which we must somehow process into a simplified form. Whether we construe the task as formulating hypotheses, proposing alternative stories, or creating interventions, the first task is to avoid being overwhelmed by inform...

There are good theoretical grounds for supposing that the beliefs that abusive parents hold about their children are an important factor in determining whether, and in what ways, a child will be abused. A knowledge of the causal attributions held by abusive parents, both in general and with respect to their children, should be a powerful and releva...

Although failure to thrive in the absence of organic cause was originally regarded as an outcome of emotional deprivation, the consensus among practioners now is that it results directly from inadequate nutrition, though the causes of poor feeding practices may well have origins in psychological difficulties of the parents and/or the child. An inte...

Children attending primary schools in Leeds were tested soon after school entry with the Standardized Motor Test Battery (SMTB), specifically designed for this study and comprising: finger tapping, peg moving, bead threading, standing on one leg, hopping and walking. Norms of motor performance are provided for each test. Seventeen children failed t...

Recent theoretical and methodological advances in developmental psychology offer new possibilities in the assessment of developmentally disordered infants which carry significant advantages over current procedures. It is argued that infant competence is not solely a quality inherent within the individual, but is a function of a particular individua...

The ability of 3- to 5-day-old neonates to discriminate between auditory stimuli, in terms of each of the dimensions of intensity, pitch and time, was studied using heart-rate responses in a habituation paradigm. For each of the dimensions a survey of the literature failed to provide results which could be used as the basis for later work involving...

The heart rate (HR), being readily affected by many forms of stimulation, is likely to be a particularly useful index of neonatal response. However measures of HR change have been applied without proper evaluation and without being tested against controls, with consequent loss of generality of findings. A procedure for choosing response measures, i...

This chapter describes a particular approach to the analysis of qualitative interview data. The method is grounded in attribution theory, and provides an analysis of expressions of causal beliefs offered during interviews, therapy sessions, or any other verbal material. The method is illustrated by describing its application to a set of passenger i...