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ABSTRACT
The effect of affective group bibliotherapy (GB) was compared to affective group therapy (GT) on patients' functioning in therapy and their session impression. Three small groups totaling twenty-five in-patients in a hospital in Israel participated in the study. Clients concurrently participated in both group types, undergoing three sessions in each condition. In-therapy behaviors were assessed through the Client Behavior System (CBS; Hill & O'Brien, 1999). Results indicated that in the GB condition compared to the GT condition, clients showed less resistance, used simple responses less frequently, and expressed greater affective exploration. The Session Evaluation Questionnaire (SEQ: Stiles et al., 1994) was used to measure clients' impressions of the sessions. Results indicated that patients evaluated the two treatment conditions equally. Overall, the results support earlier findings, suggesting that affective bibliotherapy can be an effective method of treatment.
In this study we evaluated bibliotherapy, defined as "the therapeutic use of books" (Jackson, 2001, p. 289), as an adjunctive method of group therapy. While comparative studies of treatment approaches are sometimes dismissed in the research literature because they have failed to find consistent differences in outcomes and because the research tends to support the primacy of common factors (e.g., therapist effects, therapeutic alliance) (Chambless & Cris-Christoph, 2006), the 5% to 8% explained variance attributed to methods of treatment do not differ substantially from the therapist's explained variance (8%) or client-therapist alliance (10%). Chambless and Cris-Christoph explain, "Treatment methods are not where all the action is in relation to outcomes, but they are the logical place to intervene to improve care" (p. 200). Ogles, Anderson, and Lunnen (1999) conclude their review of methods with the recommendation to study the contribution of methods through process-oriented session-by- session evaluation, because such studies would seem to provide a unique perspective for their usefulness.
Based on this recommendation, the current study was designed to compare selected process variables between group bibliotherapy (GB) and group therapy (GT). The same "affective-support" group treatment (Kivlighan & Holmes, 2004) was employed in the two conditions, in which the focus of treatment is on the expression of feelings, cognitive and affective exploration, and group support. However, while in GT it is the group members who initiate the issues and topics for discussion, in GB a literature...