Mark your diaries now: Motivational Interviewing Symposium

We are excited to provide you all with advanced notice of the second MI Symposium, to be held in Auckland 7-9 March 2012.Terri Moyers from the USA is going to participate as a speaker and offer a professional development workshop. Terri has been investigating the processes that occur within MI sessions. Specifically, she is linking clinician activity to subsequent client behaviour and then evaluates how client behaviours predict later treatment outcomes. Most recently, she and colleagues reported on the results of two trials.

 

In the first study she describes the development of SCOPE (Sequential Code for Observing Process Exchanges), an instrument that codes clinician’s behaviour as MI consistent, inconsistent or neutral and then evaluates what type of client responses occur subsequently. SCOPE demonstrates clear correlations between MI consistent behaviours and change talk; it also shows that client’s sustain talk or resistance talk happens when clinicians engage in MI inconsistent behaviour. This finding supports that clinician behaviour is associated with the appearance of change talk and sustain talk. This data was extracted from 38 Motivational Enhancement Therapy (MET) videotapes made during the Project MATCH trial. These tapes, chosen randomly from a larger sample, came from five sites around the USA and involved people receiving treatment for alcohol dependence or abuse as outpatients or in aftercare.

 

The second study also used MATCH data, but only from the New Mexico site of MATCH. Using 45 videotapes, selected at random from a total of 226, this study found that Change Talk in the first treatment session predicted outcomes at the 9 to 12 month follow-up, even when problem severity at baseline was taken into account. Perhaps most interesting about this study was that it evaluated Change Talk across all three MATCH treatment conditions (MET, Twelve Step Facilitation and Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy; n = 15 per condition). Change talk was observed in all three and predicted outcome in all three. This research supports the association between clinician behaviour, client behaviour and treatment outcome and demonstrates that change talk is not specific to one form of therapy. It also suggests that therapies, like MI, that attempt to elicit and reinforce change talk may be important in improving client outcomes.

 

Just like last time, we will be looking for people to provide presentations. We are also going to offer three one-day professional development workshops on 14 March. So if you have an idea about providing a one day workshop, please let us know. There will be some form of honorarium provided for the workshop (e.g. travel and accommodation, event registration).

 

In a month or so, we will send out another email looking for speakers and topics (research, theory and practice on MI) for the two days.

 

Reference: Moyers, T.B., Manuel, J.K., Wilson, P.G., Hendrickson, S.M.L., Talcot, W., & Durand, P. (2008). A randomized trial investigating training in motivational interviewing for behavioral health providers. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 36, 149-162.