Introduction to the Special issue on Qualitative and Quantitative Research in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy

In the last years it has been recognized that qualitative – as well as quantitative – research can inform clinical practice, making important contributions, and helping to bridging the gap between research and practice in psychotherapy. However, most psychotherapy research, both with quantitative and qualitative methodology has been done with adults, neglecting either the importance of empirical studies with children and adolescents and the special characteristics of psychotherapy in these age groups, which are sensitive to developmental issues (Midgley, 2004). In the recent years, it has been created a special interest group of Society for Psychotherapy Research on Child and Family Therapy Research (SPR-CaFTR), which aim is to improve the specificity of this field; SPR-CaFTR organized in the last SPR meetings different panels and discussions related to this topic, showing how qualitative and quantitative research in child an adolescent psychotherapy is growing. Despite this growing interest, it is difficult to find published papers using qualitative and quantitative research in child and adolescent psychotherapy. Within their international collaboration, Claudia Capella and Adriana Lis proposed to the journal Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process and Outcome (RIPPPO) a call for papers in this field to fill the gap found in literature, and they obtained the enthusiastic approval by the Editorial Board. We are pleased to introduce the readers of RIPPPO to the rich final collection of 18 articles on research in psychotherapy on children and adolescents. In line with the journal scope, high quality papers from Sweden, Chile, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, and USA, devised from different theoretical and methodological perspectives, were published. The special issue contains several kinds of contributions, divided into two RIPPPO volumes, 18(2) 2015 and 19(1) 2016: proposal of new methodology, original researches in psychotherapy on children and on adolescents, single case studies, multiple informants researches, and in conclusion a literature review. The article collection starts with a very important work developed at the Institute of Psychotherapy in Stockholm, by Sandell (2015a, 2015b): the Manual and Commentary of Rating the outcomes of psychotherapy or psychoanalysis using the Change After Psychotherapy (CHAP) scales. It has been inspired by American studies with follow-up interviews after psychoanalysis by Pfeffer (1959) and Schlessinger and Robbins (1974), among others. CHAP manual is presented and one (or more) interviews as well as a set of ratings on the basis of this or these interviews are illustrated. These interviews are basically focused on the patient’s subjective experience of the state of having changed or not. The power of the method is that it may be used both for research or more formal evaluation, and for the therapist once in a while systematically to judge for himself/herself how a therapy is developing. If CHAP resulted useful both for adults and adolescents patients evaluation, Luzzi, Bardi, Ramos, and Slapak (2015) presented the preliminary result of a method of psychoanalytic psychotherapy process analysis specifically developed for children (MAPPPC). Within the perspective of the object relations theory, changes in child patients’ anxieties, defense mechanisms, object relations and unconscious phantasies, in each psychoanalytic psychotherapy session and throughout their entire psychotherapy were analyzed both from a qualitative and quantitative point of view. MAPPP-C indicators, units of analysis, development of analytical codes, training of raters and inter-rater reliability as well as examples of MAPPPC application were presented. Introduction to the Special issue on Qualitative and Quantitative Research in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy