1 - (SYM 123) Prediction of Adolescent Psychotherapy Outcomes Using Self- and Caregiver-reported Symptoms Data

While numerous randomized controlled trials have examined the benefits of measurement-based care (MBC) in adults, MBC is under-studied in youth samples (Bergman et al., 2018). MBC is likely more complex with youth clients, given that it often involves incorporating feedback from clients and caregivers, who often do not agree with one another (De Los Reyes et al., 2015). In addition to multiple domains of measures, there is emerging evidence in MBC for adult populations that providing clinicians with treatment-specific benchmarks (i.e., expected treatment response [ETR] graphs) can improve clinical outcomes (Delgadillo et al., 2017). Although the research with adults suggests the use of clinical benchmarks is an evidence-based practice, their use with children and adolescents has not been sufficiently studied. This presentation will report the results of a study using treatment benchmarking to derive ETR curves based on self-and caregiver-reported data for adolescents receiving treatment in community-based settings. The sample comprises 2406 youth (53% female, M age = 13.00, SD = 3.39). The sample was split into a training phase to derive ETR over the course of treatment, and a test phase designed to assess the predictive accuracy of the ETR. According to the adolescents, symptom reports indicative of being outside the expected range of improvement based on results from the training phase significantly predicted a lack of improvement during the course of treatment by the eighth session of treatment with large effect sizes in the test sample. Analyses of the caregiver sample are consistent with adolescent self-reports. The present study is one of the first studies conducted on youth samples and corroborates the results of Cannon et al. (2010) and Bone et al. (2022), indicating that a lack of treatment response can be detected fairly early in treatment. Future research should focus on interventions designed to restore indications of individual’s treatment being off track to levels of expected improvement.