Intervention or treatment acceptability has recently become a focus of counseling psychology research, although it has been recognized as an important issue in the consultation literature for the last decade. Acceptability has been defined by Kazdin (1980a) as judgments by nonprofessionals, clients, and other potential consumers of treatments about the procedures of treatment. Early investigations in the counseling literature have indicated intervention acceptability may be a promising factor in counseling.
The purpose of this study was to investigate factors affecting intervention acceptability from the viewpoint of the consumer. The investigation was designed to uncover the attributes adult individuals notice when a counseling intervention designed for the treatment of loneliness is presented. This was accomplished through solicitation of similarity judgments of the interventions from potential treatment consumers.
The participants in this study were two-hundred-forty-one male and female college students attending educational psychology classes at a Midwestern university. The Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale (Russell, Peplau, & Cutrona, 1980) was administered to each participant. The results of the loneliness measure yielded 21 lonely and 161 non-lonely participants. Each participant was asked to sort 33 counseling interventions designed for the treatment of loneliness according to their similarities three times. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) procedures were used to identify the attributes noticed by the lonely and non-lonely individuals.
Four dimensions, named according to their ability to reflect the majority of the data, were identified for both the lonely and the non-lonely groups. The dimensions that emerged were labeled activity, relationship, difficulty, and fit. The similarity of the dimensions for both groups was measured by the coefficient of congruence (CC). The solutions for both groups were very similar, although some differences in the placement of interventions on the difficulty and fit dimensions were noted. Results of the study offer support for some of the constructs of a current model of treatment acceptability (Conoley, Conoley, Ivey, & Scheel, 1991). Implications and research limitations are discussed.
