Major revisions for Jakobsladder are underway and new users are encouraged to wait for the new version before discovering this process research tool.

The current version of Jakobsladder was developed in 2002, while I was a student in professional psychology. During six years, we have gained much experience and data. The ambition of the Jakobsladder project has been to promote psychotherapy process research by providing tools for quality assurance, time and cost efficiency in scale development, training, and research. At present we have reached far by systematizing information on various scales for individual as well as group therapy. New version has been evaluated and testing is in process. We hope by the time with enough funding to reach our ambitious goal to become a significant and free support for more and better psychotherapy process research around the world. New features of the new version include internet video and group scales.

In the mean time we ask for patience with the old version as there are little resources for corrections. We do not advise any registration of new users until the new version is ready for common use.

This program was developed to assist researchers in training raters and determining reliabilities for a wide range of instruments for the assessment of psychotherapy.

Trainees can use this program to:

• access instruction manuals,


• practice learning a process coding method


• test themselves in how well they have learned it.

• The Achievement of Therapeutic Objectives (ATOS) by Leigh McCullough


• The Affect Attunement Scale (AAS) by Martin Svartberg


• The Defense Mechanism Rating Scale (DMRS) by Chris Perry

Learn more about Jakobsladder by downloading this powerpoint presentation presentation .

Automated On-Line Tutorial for;

1. Training Research Raters of Psychotherapy
   For evaluating psychotherapy sessions (on videotape or audiotape or transcripts) with (potentially) a wide variety of assessment instruments (e.g., alliance, interventions, defense or affect ratings, depression scales, SAS-B, etc.).
   
   
2. Teaching Psychotherapy
   Through interactive assessment of psychotherapy sessions on tapes or transcripts is an excellent method for initial learning of therapy interventions or clinical methods.

JakobsLadder was created by Jakob Valen, while he was a graduate student in clinical psychology at the Norwegian Institute of Science and Technology (NTNU). He saw the possibility of using the computer to; 1) ease the laborious and repetitive process of training and testing trainees in the collection of psychotherapy process data, and, 2) automate the computing of reliability statistics for trainees at each stage of the process. Learn more about Jakobsladder by downloading this powerpoint presentation presentation .

Leigh McCullough, a visiting Professor at NTNU, welcomed Jakob’s initiative and helped him to develop the program. She named the program “JakobsLadder, because Jakob had created a step-by-step on-line web-based tutorial or “teaching machine” that enables trainees to improve their psychotherapy process coding skills through repeated practice and testing until reliability is attained. (At the end of the training, the trainee is given a certificate stating the level of reliability that has been reached, and this can be taken to the Principal Investigator when the designated degree of reliability has been reached.)

Although this program was originally designed for research purposes, it became evident to Leigh and Jakob that it could also serve as an excellent training tool for learning specific psychotherapeutic interventions. These interventions taught on line will be drawn from empirically supported processes noted in the process research.