Brief Strategic Family Therapy (BSFT)
BPP03
2001 (Updated 08/2006)
PDF Version of Fact Sheet
Contact BSFT
Program Overview:
Brief Strategic Family Therapy (BSFT) adopts a structural family systems framework to improve youth's behavior problems by improving family interactions that are presumed to be directly related to the child's symptoms.
Program Targets:
The target population in general are children and adolescents between 8 and 17 years of age displaying or at risk for developing behavior problems, including substance abuse.
Program Content:
BSFT is a short-term, problem-focused intervention with an emphasis on modifying maladaptive patterns of interactions. Typical sessions last from 60 to 90 minutes, with 12-15 sessions over three months. Therapy is based upon the assumption that each family has unique characteristics that emerge when family members interact, and that this family "system" influences all members of the family, thus the family is viewed as a whole organism. The repetitive interactions, or ways in which family members interact and behave with regard to one another can be either successful or unsuccessful. BSFT targets these interaction patterns that are directly related to the youth's behavior problems and establishes a practical plan to help the family develop more effective patterns of interaction.
The three primary components of the intervention are:
- Joining: understanding resistance and engaging the family in therapy;
- Diagnosis: identifying the interaction patterns that encourage problematic youth behavior; and
- Restructuring: developing a specific plan to help change maladaptive family interaction patterns by working in the present, reframing, and working with boundaries and alliances.
Program Outcomes:
BSFT adolescents showed significant reductions in Conduct Disorder and Socialized Aggression from pre- to post-treatment, while group therapy adolescents showed no significant changes. There were also clinically significant changes in Conduct Disorder and Socialized Aggression favoring the treatment group over the control group.
References
Robbins, M.S., & Szapocznik, J. (2000, April). Brief Strategic Family Therapy. (NCJ 179825). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Szapocznik, J., & Williams, R.A. (2000, June). Brief Strategic Family Therapy: Twenty-Five Years of Interplay Among Theory, Research and Practice in Adolescent Behavior Problems and Drug Abuse. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 3(2), 117-134.
Contact BSFT
| For general program information, contact: |
| Center for Family Studies University of Miami, School of Medicine 1425 NW 10th Avenue, 3rd Floor Miami, FL 33136 Phone: (305) 243-2226 or (305) 243-4592 Fax: (305) 243-5577 Email: mpadron@med.miami.edu Website: www.BSFT.org |
