How are online and face-to-face psychotherapy perceived by clients? A metaphor analysis

Abstract

Studies about online psychotherapy have gained momentum as the coronavirus pandemic has had an impact on conducting them face to face. The effectiveness and therapeutic alliance in online psychotherapy have been examined and sometimes compared with face-to-face psychotherapy. In these studies, it was seen that mainly quantitative methods were used. Exploratory qualitative research is needed to refine the literature on online psychotherapy. For this purpose, in this study, data obtained from clients who received face-to-face or online psychotherapy were analyzed using the metaphor analysis method, which is one of the descriptive phenomenological approaches. According to the data obtained from 116 people, nine different categories of metaphors related to online and face-to-face psychotherapy were obtained. The most frequent metaphors about online psychotherapy belonged to categories of convenience, artificiality, similarity to face-to-face psychotherapy, and ineffectiveness. The frequent metaphors about face-to-face psychotherapy belonged to categories of contact, effectiveness, reality, and difficulty. When the participants were divided into two groups according to their age, the opinions about online psychotherapy differed in the two age groups. Similarly, the opinions of people who received psychotherapy with different methods differed for the online psychotherapy. Clinical implications and limitations were discussed.