Concepts of Causality Applied in the Clinic: Interactional Models and Attributional Style

The purpose of the investigation was to compare causal attributions made by families attending a therapy clinic with those made by control families in interview. Attributional statements were extracted from transcripts of ten therapy sessions and ten control interviews, and coded according to a system described in Stratton et al. (1986). In order to examine the issue of whether a family can be said to possess an attributional style,...