Evolving an idionomic approach to processes of change: Towards a unified personalized science of human improvement
Explains the move from treatment packages towards processes of change and personalised science.
What helps one person may not help another in quite the same way. Process-based therapy asks which patterns of thinking, feeling and acting matter in a particular person’s life, rather than starting and ending with a treatment package or diagnosis.
The idionomic approach starts with the individual. Repeated observations can help researchers examine how processes and outcomes move together within that person, before asking what can be learned across people.
This research line combines conceptual frameworks with assessment and methods. The PBAT provides an item pool; case-conceptualisation studies and statistical tutorials explore how to work with person-specific patterns. These tools support investigation, not an automatic treatment prescription.
Start with the framework and PBAT papers below, then move to the individual-level studies. Protocols, tutorials and commentaries have different purposes from outcome trials; their paper summaries make those distinctions clear.
Key papers: a reading path
Developing an item pool to assess processes of change in psychological interventions: The Process-Based Assessment Tool (PBAT)
Introduces the PBAT item pool for assessing processes of change.
Toward empirical process-based case conceptualization: An idionomic network examination of the process-based assessment tool
Examines how processes and outcomes form person-specific networks.
The role of the individual in the coming era of process-based therapy
Sets out why the individual matters in process-based therapy research.
Process-Based Therapy: A Common Ground for Understanding and Utilizing Therapeutic Practices
Presents a shared framework for understanding therapeutic practices across schools.
Testing the applicability of idionomic statistics in longitudinal studies: The example of ‘doing what matters’
Uses doing what matters as an example of individual-level statistical analysis.
Time series machine learning for idionomic process-based treatment planning: A tutorial on tsBoruta
Offers a tutorial on time-series machine learning for treatment planning.
Measures and tools
Collaborators in these papers
Coauthors in this selection include Steven C. Hayes, Stefan G. Hofmann, Baljinder K. Sahdra, Fredrick Chin, Brandon T. Sanford, Cristóbal Hernández. Full author lists appear on the linked paper pages.
How to cite the core work
Cite the specific paper that supports the point you are making, rather than this reading guide. Starting references:
Hayes, S. C., Ciarrochi, J., Hofmann, S. G., Chin, F., & Sahdra, B. (2022). Evolving an idionomic approach to processes of change: Towards a unified personalized science of human improvement. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 156, 104155. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2022.104155
Ciarrochi, J., Sahdra, B., Hofmann, S. G., & Hayes, S. C. (2022). Developing an item pool to assess processes of change in psychological interventions: The Process-Based Assessment Tool (PBAT). Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 23, 200–213. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcbs.2022.02.001
Sanford, B. T., Ciarrochi, J., Hofmann, S. G., Chin, F., Gates, K. M., & Hayes, S. C. (2022). Toward empirical process-based case conceptualization: An idionomic network examination of the process-based assessment tool. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 25, 10–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcbs.2022.05.006