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Symposium

Transdiagnostic and Therapeutic Processes

Transdiagnostic Interventions for Young People: Current Evidence Base and Critical Next Steps

3 - (SYM 19) MATCH, FIRST, and the Search for Clinician Decision Guidance

Thursday, June 25, 2026
4:48 PM - 5:09 PM PDT
Location: Yerba Buena Salon 10, B3 Level
Keywords: Transdiagnostic, Child, Adolescents
Abstract Body
MATCH (Chorpita & Weisz, 2009) and FIRST (Weisz & Bearman, 2020) represent two different approaches to transdiagnostic intervention design, both focused on treatment of children and adolescents for disorders and problems involving anxiety, depression, trauma, and conduct problems. MATCH uses modules (brief descriptions of treatment procedures), organizing them according to the diagnostic categories they are associated with (e.g., exposure, the “Practicing” module, for anxiety; behavioral activation, the “Activity Selection” module, for depression). FIRST organizes treatment procedures according to which of five broad empirically supported principles of change (e.g., Feeling Calm, Solving Problems) they are associated with. Decisions about which intervention procedures to use, and when, are supported to some extent by flowcharts in MATCH and decision trees in FIRST,  and these forms of support do provide clinicians with some conceptual guidance as they plan and implement treatment with individual youths. However, case by case and session by session decisions by clinicians as to which treatment procedures to use with which young clients at which points in treatment rest heavily on clinical judgment. We are conducting research designed to complement and enrich clinical judgment by adding empirical data from modular treatment clinical trials. To date, we have pooled data from six clinical trials of modular treatment, generating a sample of 490 youths with 5403 sessions. We have used this dataset to assess which treatment procedures are, and which are not, associated with symptom reduction during treatment, conducting separate analyses of between- and within-person associations between procedures and symptom change, and examining moderators of the associations. In this presentation, we will describe findings from this research and discuss how evidence of this kind may be used to build decision support tools for clinicians who implement transdiagnostic treatments.