Validating the SWAN-OM: A New Outcome Measure for Single-Session Therapy

Here’s a short summary of a research paper looking at how Kooth measures the effectiveness of single sessions. The super short version is: it works.

For a little more detail, and hot on the heels of an amazing SST5 event - proudly sponsored by Kooth - read on…

Single-session therapy (SST) is frequently used by people engaging in online therapy. This article presents evidence on the validity of Kooth’s SST outcome measure. The Session Wants and Needs Outcome Measure (SWAN-OM) is user-centric and aims to capture in-session goals.

Key Insights

• The SWAN-OM provides pre-defined goals for the session. The person engaging in therapy selects their wants and needs before the intervention begins and scores their progress once the session has ended. These elements are critical to the success of brief interventions, which are typically solution-focused
• Completion rates are important when evaluating a new outcome measure. The SWAN-OM pre-chat completion rates were high, with over three-quarters (78.69%) completing it. Post-session SWAN-OM completion rate was also high (86.14%)
• Three instruments were used to explore how well the SWAN-OM interacts with other well-established standardised outcome and experience measures (PANAS, YCIS, and ESQ). The SWAN-OM demonstrated good concurrent validity by comparison

Future research on SWAN-OM’s validity may answer what works best for whom and under what conditions, in an attempt to generalise its use and standardisation. This is important because the objectives of single-session encounters can vary widely from person to person.

For more on how we offer single session support, click the link below! https://connect.kooth.com/single-session-therapy