Key Factors in Psychotherapy Training: An analysis of trainers’, trainees and psychotherapists’ points of view.

Objective: Actually few works investigate which are the factors considered relevant in training programs. Since in literature a specific tool to reach this goal is lacking, the main aim of this work was to construct a questionnaire to assess which are the factors that trainers, trainees and psychotherapists consider to be the relevant in psychotherapy training programs. Moreover, to an explorative level, we investigated if the emerged dimensions where differently associated to trainers, trainees and psychotherapists. Method: The questionnaire has been built ad hoc for this research and was administered in twenty-four psychotherapy school, belonging to 13 psychotherapy institute (641 trainees, 172 trainers and 221 psychotherapists). The trainees were distributed in the four years of training program. The questionnaire included 63 items on a five point Likert scale organized on five areas: technical/methodological, organizational, didactic, personal and theoretical. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was run in order to identify the latent structure, and the reliability of the dimensions was checked; finally a t-test and ANOVA allowed to attain the other research goals. Results: Six different factors emerged for the three groups of participants. Among these we found personal features of the teachers, didactics, supervision, theory and organization. These dimensions had acceptable reliability as internal consistency. The factors have a different ranking according to the three considered categories, the year of course of the trainees and the school's theoretical background.