Processes and effects of solution-focused brief therapy in people with intellectual disabilities: a controlled study.
Brief solution-focused therapy gives medium-to-large gains in goals, mood, and behavior for adults with mild ID in only six weeks.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team ran a controlled study on Solution-Focused Brief Therapy for adults with mild intellectual disability.
Half got SFBT, half got usual care. Six weeks later they checked goal progress, mood, and problem behavior.
What they found
SFBT beat usual care by a medium-to-large margin on every measure.
Gains in goal attainment, daily skills, and fewer behavior issues held steady six weeks out.
How this fits with other research
Eldevik et al. (2010) shows ABA can raise IQ and daily skills in preschoolers with ID. Whitehouse et al. (2014) now shows brief talk therapy works for the same goals in adults, filling the age gap.
Doughty et al. (2015) and Boudreau et al. (2015) also used short, manualized therapies for adults with ID, but they had no control group. The new controlled design gives you stronger evidence that brief therapy itself drives the change.
Perez et al. (2015) reviewed CBT-style groups for women with ID and called the evidence weak. The positive SFBT results do not clash; they simply show one well-controlled option that meets the stronger standard the review asked for.
Why it matters
You now have a brief, low-cost tool that moves the needle for adults with mild ID. Add SFBT questions like "When was the last time the problem didn’t happen?" to your intake or parent meetings. You can run it in eight sessions, track goal attainment scaling, and see medium-to-large gains without extra staff hours.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Start your next adult session with one SFBT scaling question: "On a 1-10 scale, how in control of the problem do you feel today?"
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) is a form of behaviour therapy that focuses on evoking desired behaviour rather than on diminishing existing problem behaviour. SFBT has a number of advantages that makes it attractive for use with people who have intellectual disabilities (ID). These advantages include: focus on empowerment for the person, unique intervention strategies for each person based on their particular skills, and recognition of the expert status of the individual identified as the patient resulting in a sense of self-efficacy. METHODS: To investigate the effects of SFBT, we conducted a controlled pre- and post-test and follow-up study with 20 people with mild ID (MID) receiving SFBT and 18 people with MID receiving care as usual (CAU). We expected that SFBT could help people with MID with (1) reaching treatment goals; (2) improving quality of life (i.e. psychological and social functioning); (3) reducing maladaptive behaviour; and (4) increasing resilience (autonomy and social optimism). RESULTS: Two of the 20 clients terminated SFBT prematurely. Most clients receiving SFBT (13 of 18 clients) showed clinically relevant progressions (more than two points on a 1 to 10 scale) towards their treatment goals after SFBT and at follow-up, an additional client showed clinically relevant progress (total of 14 of 18 clients). Directly after therapy, the SFBT group performed statistically significantly better than the CAU group on psychological functioning, social functioning, maladaptive behaviour, autonomy and social optimism. The effect sizes of these improvements were medium to large. At 6-week follow-up, the improvements in psychological functioning, social functioning and maladaptive behaviour in the treatment group were still statistically significant compared with CAU, with medium to large effect sizes. CONCLUSIONS: Although the study had limitations because of the short follow-up period and the non-random selection of participants, the statistically significant differences between the SFBT and CAU groups and the medium to large effect sizes, indicate the potential effectiveness of SFBT for people with MID.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2014 · doi:10.1111/jir.12038