A pool of items concerned with expectations of the therapist role was administered in two forms (original and reduced) to two Sam les of patients makng theii initial contact at a psychiatric outpatient clinic. &ve of the eight factors from the first patient sample were consistent with the client-centered model. I n the second Sam le, of the four factors extracted Em athy and Commitment formed (one Pactor independently of Genuineness. fn both samplea, expectations of Confrontation and Diectiveness were inde endent. Individual d8erencea in patients' expectations and correlations witg other demographic and expectation data were reported to support the construct validity of the dimemons which yield a new memure of patients' expectations. It is clear from empirical work in level of aspiration research (Lewin, Dembo, Festinger, & Sears, 1944), experimenter expectancy research (Rosenthal, 1969), and placebo research (Shapiro, 1971), and from the theoretical formulations of Bruner (194l), Postman (1951), Rotter (1954), and Kelly (1963) that expectations affect experience. A person's expectations of psychiatric treatment are likely to affect his/her experience of and response to treatment. It is, therefore, important to have available an instrument to measure such expectations. Previous research focused on expectations of success (Goldstein, 1962), expectations of the aims and goals of treatment (Hill, 1969)' expectations of the conduct of treatment (Aronson & Overall, 1966), and expectations of the therapist's role.
Role expectations appear to be important to the process of treatment (Frank, 1959), and in this area a variety of themes has been investigated including patients' expectations of the extent to which therapists would be active, passive, supportive (Aronson & Overall, 1966), directive, impersonal, analytic (Begley & Lieberman, 1964), and/or nurturant, critical, and permissive (Apfelbaum, 1958). Rickers-Ovsiankina, Berzins, Geller, & Rogers (1971) developed scales to measure clients' expectations of their own role using the dimensions of advice, approval, audience, and relationship-seeldng. These scales were judged inappropriate for assessing clinic patients' expectations of treatment. In the first place, they were developed for use with a college population, hence their suitability for patients of widely differing social class and education level is questionable. Second, the scales focus on psychotherapy per se, and many clinic patients are not offered psychotherapy. Third, the scales are not systematically related to any theoretical model of psychopathology or treatment, so that their generality is limited to those relationships between expectations and the processes and outcome of therapy which can be established empirically.
The aim of this research was to develop an instrument appropriate for a range of clinic patients. Specifically, it was to establish the underlying dimensions of successive pools of items measuring patients' expectations about the therapist, *Requests for a reprint as well as a copy of the item pool and factor loadings for all analyses reported, may be obtained Irom Beth Freeman,