What is Transforming Care about?
The Transforming Care Project is a being conducted by a trans Doctoral Candidate in Clinical Psychology at The City University of New York.
The goal is to identify the needs and measurement of mental health provider’s skills specific to providing care to trans and gender expansive clients.
To do this, we’re designing a client-rated, written measure based on a review of trans people’s experiences in therapy, in their own words.
We also looked to the clinical guidelines of American Psychological Association, the American Counseling Association, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
We reviewed other measures of skill in working with trans and gender expansive clients that were often limited to a few questions within a larger LGBTQ+ skills assessment, and were designed to be rated by the clinician, based on self-assessment.
The assessments that are dedicated to trans and gender expansive care have not been through the rigorous process of psychometric assessment, and are still self-rated by the clinician.
Because we know that trans people are the experts in our own experiences, and no one of us can represent all of us, we’re hoping to get input from diverse members of our community in this process.
After we’ve updated the measure to address community feedback, we’ll test the measure’s psychometric properties to confirm that it’s a useful tool.
The Project
Phases of Research
Item Development
Phase 1: Complete!
Review of Qualitative Research of trans and gender expansive voices, Professional Guidelines, and Current Assessments to generate potential questions that would assess a mental health professional’s skill in working with trans and gender expansive clients in talk therapy.
Now, we’re moving on to Phase 2, where we’ll get community feedback and input to make the measure even better!
Measure Development
Phase 2: NOW RECRUITING
Conducting interviews with a small but diverse group of trans and gender expansive clients and mental health professionals to get feedback on the questions we’ve come up with, questions we missed, and whether it makes sense when we put them all together.
Then, we’ll update the measure based on the community’s input to test it in Phase 3!
Measure Evaluation
Phase 3: Coming Soon!
Giving the measure to a large number of trans and gender expansive people who have been in talk therapy to test for psychometric validity. To show that it can be useful in a variety of environments, we’ll see if the measure gives similar results, regardless of factors that could impact how people understand the questions. We’ll also compare it against other measures.
Using this information, we’ll formally analyze the data using statistical reliability, validity, and factor analyses.
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