Statistician meets practitioner/researcher: a response to Dominic Hosemans

Abstract

The GTFS is a measure developed by Fogarty et al. (2015, 2016, 2019a, 2019b) that has been demonstrated to have scientifically robust content validity, face validity, criterion validity and reliability (Fogarty et al., 2019a). There are many ways to develop a fidelity scale for treatment adherence. The choices made in developing the GTFS were made under the supervision of a professor of psychology with extensive experience in scale development. The research used to develop the GTFS was then reviewed by, and accepted for publication in, the leading academic journal in the field, Psychotherapy Research (PR). This is the first time that an article about Gestalt therapy (GT) has ever been published in that journal; esteemed Gestalt colleagues have previously published in PR, but have not been able to refer to the modality as Gestalt (because of the lack of a scientific basis for Gestalt). So Hosemans’ claim that the GTFS is ‘a seemingly invalid, unreliable, and ineffective scale’ is both at odds with the views of the academic reviewers for PR; and, as the word ‘seemingly’ betrays, an assertion based on conjecture. It would take scientific research to determine whether and how the GTFS might be improved to reflect more holistically the phenomenological foundations of GT.