GOAL TAILORING
Sometimes, upon encountering the family, the
therapist found that their agenda for
change differed somewhat from his own. They may have either had goals that were
very specific, or had more goals than he did.
Principle 13: The therapist should adopt the family's
goals for the index patient as the primary ones
for treatment. Examples of this have been presented above. For instance, the
therapist might learn that employment
for the IP is paramount for the family. He should accept this and describe how the family-treatment program can lead toward job placement. Usually, then, the
therapist wants to first find out
what the family is interested in changing,
because this is
realizing their goals.
In discussing goals for coming in, the question
arises whether the families were motivated by the money they
would receive. Each member got $ I 0.00 for participating in the
Family Evaluation Session, a nontreatment research exercise. While the
money was mentioned as an incentive in many of our cases (usually as
-payment for your giving up your time, since I know you're very
busy-) we and our staff are convinced that it was not a very important
variable—less im-portant than we anticipated. Of the cases that
were not to receive any money beyond what they got for the Family Evaluation Session, 92% continued past this session into family treatment.
Only in rare in-stances did it appear
to make a crucial difference. In fact, some families actually tried to refuse it, and these were not wealthy people. While reimbursement did help the retention of families in treatment (see Appendix C), we are not impressed with its
importance in family recruitment. For the most part, we would
advocate the use of money during recruitment as a helpful option mainly in
cases when it is requested by the family to defray transportation
expenses to the
treatment or evaluation site.
