Beer, R. & Breuer, P. (2002). Brief Behavioral Couples Therapy as an Internet Based Tele-Health Program. Paper presented at the 36th Annual Convention of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy (AABT), November 14-17, 2002, Reno, Nevada, USA.
Abstract:
For a variety of reasons there is a growing interest in brief behavioral couples therapy. Brief therapy is a very attractive alternative to traditional couples therapy, especially for couples with young children and for couples living in rural areas where therapists are hardly available. But still many couples have to travel a great distance to see their therapists face-to-face. Internet-based therapy is a new approach to facilitate further access to couples therapy wherein couples and therapists use online messages to communicate. Data from an ongoing study is presented in which an internet-based behavioral couples therapy (IBBCT) is compared with a face-to-face brief behavioral couples therapy (BBCT). In both groups relationship satisfaction was measured using the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (Spanier, 1976) and the Short Relationship Satisfaction Questionnaire (Beer, 2001).
Couples in the BBCT group participated in four-session face-to-face therapeutic contacts. The highly structured BBCT developed by Beer (1999) was based on the ideas of Halford, Osgarby, and Kelly (1996) who had developed and successfully tested assessment, feedback and goal-setting as ingredients of a brief behavioral couples therapy.
Couples in the IBBCT group received six weeks of internet-based therapy with one short virtual client-therapist contact on each weekday. For IBBCT many of the interventions used in BBCT were transformed into an online format that addresses specific problems of internet-based communication. Recent research has shown improvement in partners' mutual support to be an important mediator of change in BBCT (Beer, 2001), thus interventions designed to improve mutual support were added.
Pros and cons of both settings will be discussed as well as the methods used to overcome typical problems of internet-based therapy such as usability and confidentiality.