Tracking group members’ change: the adaptation of the Innovative Moments Coding System for Groups in a group psychotherapy for young substance abusers

Aims. In group psychotherapy research, there are few reliable measures for tracking group members’ change (Orfanos et al., 2020). This study responds to this need by proposing a further adaptation of the Innovative Moment Coding System for Groups (IMCS-G; Esposito et al., 2021), a reliable method developed in previous studies within group counseling for detecting innovative moments (IMs; Gonçalves et al., 2011), e.g., innovative narratives that are exceptions to the clients’ problematic narratives organized in different levels of complexity in terms of meaning elaboration (Level 1, 2, and 3). The IMCS-G consists of 7 categories (Self-Directed, Other-Directed, Explicit Mirroring, Interaction 1, Interaction 2, Collective, Voice of Group) organized in two macro-categories: Individual (e.g., change was narrated by a single participant) and Group IMs (e.g., change was co-constructed by more than one participant). Methods. A group psychotherapy addressed to young substance abusers (N=8) and aimed at promoting members’ mentalization to reduce their drug addiction, was considered for this study. Eight sessions (one per month) were randomly selected and analyzed with the IMCS-G by two reliable coders and the agreement and reliability for the IMCS-G categories and their levels were calculated. Finally, trends of IMCS-G categories along the sessions were analyzed. Results. Outcome results showed a positive increase of mentalization and a partially reduction of the addiction behaviours of most group members. Results related to IMCS-G categories showed that, consistently with previous studies, a strong agreement and reliability for IMCS-G categories were found, as well as a higher frequency of Individual IMs. We also found an overall increase of Levels 2 and 3 for both Individual and Group IMs, except for the category Voice of Group. Conclusions. IMCS-G confirmed to be a reliable system to track change in different group interventions, but it also suggested rooms of improvement for some IMCS-G categories.