Can asking people on probation about their strengths improve affect, alliance, engagement, motivation and prosocial identity?

Forensic psychology has historically focused on assessing and managing deficits that contribute to offending. Recently, there has been a push across fields towards focusing on strengths in both assessment and treatment, which may have therapeutic benefits for clients (e.g. emotional well-being, positive identity, therapeutic alliance). As this has yet to be tested, we conducted a pre-registered experiment to examine the effects of strength- and risk-focused interviews on a number of therapeutic process variables. A sample of individuals on probation were randomly assigned to have a strength-focused ( n = 51) or risk-focused interview ( n = 50). Immediately after and 1 month later, participants completed measures of affect, alliance, engagement, motivation to change and identity. Contrary to our pre-registered hypotheses, participants who had a strength-focused interview did not report more positive affect ( p = .46, η 2 [95% CI] = .027 [.000, .077]), a stronger alliance with the interviewer ( p = .92, η 2 [95% CI] = .005 [.000, .051]), more engagement ( p = .58, η 2 [95% CI] = .020 [.000, .071]), or greater readiness to change ( p = .19, η 2 [95% CI] = .061 [.000, .092]) than those having a risk-focused interview immediately or 1 month later. However, participants who had a strength-focused interview perceived themselves as less likely to reoffend in the future ( p = .02, η 2 [95% CI] = .051 [.000, .154]), which remained significant 1 month later when we controlled for interviewer adherence to condition ( p = .04, η 2 [95% CI] = .052 [.000, .17]). We offer minimal initial support for the unique benefits of strength-focused (vs. risk-focused) interviews. Future research should use larger samples with adequate power to detect small effects and examine if strength-focused interviews are beneficial for culturally and linguistically diverse groups.