Exploring the black box: measuring youth treatment process and progress in usual care.

The session report form (SRF) is a 25-item self-report measure scheduled to be completed by clinicians at the end of each session. This study addresses the utility of the SRF for describing session content by exploring patterns of self-reported behavior of 235 clinicians in 7,058 sessions with 600 clients. Results indicate that the SRF has a distinct subscale of treatment process and provides an adequate range of topics related to session content while also discriminating between client and clinician influences on patterns of topics addressed. The SRF is a promising measure meeting a significant need in describing session content in usual care.