Counselors should be clear about what types of interventions they should be employing if they are using this approach. The scale also identifies types of interventions that should not be used because they are not theoretically consistent with this approach. Furthermore, the adherence scale is intended to guide trainers or supervisors in their duties supervising other addiction counselors. To this end, fairly specific instructions also are provided for how to rate the interventions correctly. Although the adherence scale identifies the types of interventions that are necessary to conduct good addiction counseling as described by this manual, not every type of intervention highlighted should be employed in every session.
Patients do differ from one another.
Different issues arise for individual patients at different points in treatment, and as various life events impact on the treatment. The adherence scale lists the repertoire of interventions that addiction counselors will be making in the string of counseling sessions. But, overall, the patient's individual needs in treatment should influence how and in what sequence these interventions actually are done. There was satisfactory interjudge reliability, which indicates that the scale can be used reliably to assess adherence and competence for IDC techniques. This finding supports the grouping of items into subscales, which then creates an easier way of understanding the theoretical types of interventions in this model.