| Go to Home Page |
Clients were matched to therapists based on how much their preferences for their therapists' age, sex, sexual orientation, race or ethnicity, economic background, marital status, and parental status matched these demographics of the therapist.
Clients were given choices in each of these areas. If they had a choice, they were then asked how important it was that the therapist met this qualification. Thus, a client could ask for a female therapist, and state that this was extremely important, and also ask for a therapist who was older than 45, but state that this was not very important.
Click here to see the Client Demographics Questionnaire
Therapists were asked to rate themselves in the same demographic categories.
For many years, researchers have been studying the efficacy of matching clients to therapists based on demographics, such as similarity of sex. The result of these studies has been that no matching by similarity has improved therapy results. Therefore, I decided to match by preference instead.
This was an extremely useful and well-liked part of TMatch. Despite original misgivings, therapists were not reluctant at all to answer any of the demographic questions. Clients were very pleased to be given the opportunity to express these preferences. The only choice that may not have been useful was Parental Status. The usefulness of this area was hard to assess, since no therapists in the study indicated to their clients (self-disclosed) what their parental status was.
This assessment should probably be retained as is, pending more results from other studies, especially in areas where there was more therapist disclosure. Another interesting idea might be to give clients access to the therapists' answers to their demographic questionnaires, so the clients would be able to answer questions about their comfort with these characteristics.