Development and Validation of the Therapist Barriers to Engaging Parents (TBEP) Measure

Parent engagement is a well-documented challenge when delivering child and adolescent mental health treatments. Therapists’ internal experiences, and how they respond to parents, may create a barrier to the parent engagement process. The current study developed the 13-item Therapist Barriers to Engaging Parents measure (TBEP) to assess providers’ internal and external experiences that operate as barriers to parent engagement. The TBEP was completed by 148 child and family therapists across the United States. The TBEP demonstrated strong internal reliability (Cronbach α =.86), and was negatively correlated with counselor efficacy, and significantly positively correlated with burnout, indicating convergent validity. Incremental validity of the subscales of the TBEP was also demonstrated. The TBEP appears to be a psychometrically sound measure of the internal barriers mental health providers experience when trying to engage parents.