Psychotherapy process as a function of the time segment sampled

Employed a content analysis of individual psychotherapy tapes of 25 female undergraduates to determine the relative frequencies of certain response measures during the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th 10-min segments of the therapeutic hr. An attempt was made to test the assumption made by many investigators that the occurrence of a given phenomenon is evenly distributed over the course of therapy. Results indicate that such an assumption is grossly inaccurate given variables appeared consistently more frequently in certain segments of the hr. than they did in others. It is suggested that examining the variable where it occurs most often will increase the power of future investigations.