ABSTRACT
A demonstration that certain workers or certain types of client are consistently associated with better outcomes may make it possible to form hypotheses about what is necessary to ensure success. This chapter distinguishes three groups of causally prior variables: those associated with the client, those associated with the organisational setting and those associated with the worker. The client variables chosen for this analysis were age, marital status and problem group. These were the variables which were associated with outcome and they were defined in such a way as to make their association with outcome as strong as possible. If the variation between workers in their proportion of task-centred cases arose from chance, one would not expect to find an association between this proportion and their problem reduction score which is logically independent of it. The association provides some evidence against the idea that the variation between workers arose from the fact that some workers were taking easier cases.
