Background: The working or helping alliance is one of the most widely studied constructs in psychotherapy process research.
Aim: The aim of this study was to adapt the patient and therapist forms of the Revised Helping Alliance Questionnaire II (HAq-II-P and HAq-II-T, respectively) into Spanish.
Method: The two measurement instruments were adapted through a systematic translation process, a pilot study and a clinical study. The psychometric properties were examined following the third psychotherapy session.
Results: Mean scores on the Spanish-language HAq-II-P and HAq-II-T were high. The corrected item-total correlations for >94% of the items were >0.30. Cronbach's α values for internal consistency were 0.88 and 0.93, respectively. Correlations for convergent validity with the respective versions of the Spanish-language Working Alliance Inventory were 0.80 and 0.87, respectively. In terms of predictive validity, there was a significant correlation between HAq-II-T and the patients' residual gain scores on the Spanish-language Beck Depression Inventory after the tenth psychotherapy session.
Conclusions: These results are consistent with studies using the original English versions of the HAq-II.
Keywords: HAq-II; Revised Helping Alliance Questionnaire; Spanish adaptation; working alliance.