Despite the evidence that suicide risk assessment training is necessary only 40-50% of psychology programs offer risk assessment training (Granello & Juhnke, 2010). In the present study an online suicide risk assessment and safety plan training workshop for graduate students in the field of psychology was investigated. Participants were randomly assigned to the control condition (lecture) or the treatment condition (lecture + demonstration). Measures of declarative knowledge of suicide risk and protective factors, application to clinical scenarios, and risk assessment and management self-efficacy scales were administered before and after completion of the workshop. Two way repeated measures ANOVA's were conducted with repeated time measures to evaluate the Time X Condition interaction. While there was a significant main effect of time on all three dependent variables, there was no significant time X condition interaction. In contrast to predictions, the added component of a demonstration did not result in greater improvements in application to clinical scenario multiple choice questions or risk assessment and management self-efficacy. Post hoc moderation analysis revealed demonstration enhanced the effects of knowledge acquisition and assessment of clinical scenarios for individuals who reported the training was less relevant to their current work. Implications of findings and directions of further research are discussed.

This study examined the relationship of client pretreatment interpersonal problems (measured by the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems) to the therapeutic alliance (as measured early in treatment by a self report version of the Working Alliance Inventory‐ Short) using multilevel modeling to account for client and counselor variables. Specifically, the correlations of dominance, hostility and cold/distance interpersonal problems with the initial working alliance were investigated. Participants consisted of 144 clients and 44 graduate student counselors at the Counselor Training Center at Arizona State University. The intraclass value of .23 indicated there is a sizable effect, with counselor differences accounting for 23% of the variance in client alliance ratings, supporting the use of multilevel modeling. There was a dominance counselor gender interaction with working alliance scores. Clients who had problems with dominance reported higher working alliance scores with male counselors while clients who had problems with submissiveness reported higher working alliance scores with female counselors. Hostile dominance interpersonal problems were associated with lower initial working alliance scores regardless of counselor gender. Implications for clinical practice are discussed.