Edwards, E. R., Kober, H., Rinne, G. R., Griffin, S. A., Axelrod, S. & Cooney, E. B. (2021). Skills‐homework completion and phone coaching as predictors of therapeutic change and outcomes in completers of a DBT intensive outpatient programme. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice 94(3): 504–522. doi:10.1111/papt.12325.
Key takeaways
From the reading, NOTE-1121. Page numbers are the journal’s.
- Urges, not behaviour frequency. Homework with change in suicide urges r = .35 and substance-use urges r = .36; coaching with self-harm urges r = .31; “Regarding frequency of engagement in target behaviours, results reflected no significant associations” (p. 513).
- Month 4. No target behaviour went with 91.3% homework completion against 79.8% (p = .02); coaching calls 6.00 against 3.85, p = .096 (p. 513).
- A selected sample. 4 of 88 dropped out and 28 were excluded for missing diary data (p. 509).
- No correction. “statistical adjustments for multiple comparisons were not feasible, increasing the likelihood of type I error” (p. 519).
Why this is here
The exchange cited it at turn U10, unnamed, as a study of 56 DBT completers in which homework and phone coaching went with better behavioural outcomes: practice carried into daily contexts is where the skill is generalized. The abstract matches. The design is correlational, in completers only.
Corrected 2026-10-24, from the reading. The associations are with falling urges, not with how often the behaviours occurred, and the one behavioural result (no target behaviour in month 4) holds for homework only. The 56 are not all completers but those of 88 who also kept enough diary cards. The study supports, weakly, that DBT practice and outcome go together; it measures neither skill use nor the cost of deploying a skill, so it cannot bear on CLAIM-443’s limits or on CLAIM-349’s note that practice makes a skill cheap to deploy. Filed from it: THEORY-922.