Parent-adolescent alliances as a predictor of retention in functional family therapy

This study examined adolescent?mother and mother?adolescent alliances and their relationship with treatment retention in Functional Family Therapy (FFT). Participants were 58 families selected from a larger sample of 240 single mothers and their delinquent adolescents. The families were classified either as treatment completers (N= 29) or dropouts (N=29). Archived videos of first and second FFT sessions were rated in 20-minute segments using the Parent-Adolescent Alliance Rating System for Therapeutic Settings to determine the nature of parent-adolescent and adolescent-parent alliances as they progressed through early treatment. As hypothesized, completer families demonstrated an increase in alliance scores from the middle to the end of second sessions while dropout families did not. Results also indicated that completer families scored significantly higher than dropout families beginning at the middle of the first session, and remaining so across all segments measured. These findings highlight the importance of parent-child relationships and how they are expressed and evolve or fail to evolve during early therapy sessions.