Strengthening Family Resilience

Abstract

Researchers in the field of marriage and family therapy have largely ignored the effect of gender bias on clinical decision making. The purpose of this study was to explore if patient gender influenced prognostic judgments and if male and female therapists utilized different client characteristics when formulating prognostic judgments. Prognostic judgments were based on clinical profiles of couples seeking marital therapy for inhibited sexual desire. The multidimensional scaling procedure, KYST, was utilized to analyze the data. The findings indicated that the identified patient's gender did not influence prognostic judgments. However, therapist gender did influence the client characteristics used to formulate prognostic judgments.