OBJECTIVE With its anonymity and accessibility, text-based online counseling has shown great potential in reaching people with mental health needs. One strategy adopted to meet the service gap is concurrent counseling, that is, each counselor attending to more than one client at a time. To date, there is no reported evidence supporting its rationality and effectiveness. This study investigated the potential opportunities, effectiveness, and caveats in concurrent service delivery and identified the optimal cutoff number of concurrent sessions while maintaining the quality of service at or above a set threshold. METHOD We analyzed the transcript of 54,716 online counseling sessions from Open Up, a free, 24/7 text-based counseling service, to develop an attention score that measures the attention allocation of counselors and examined the impact of the counselor's attention allocation on client satisfaction and service outcomes. RESULTS On average, compared to nonconcurrent sessions, concurrent sessions were longer, more likely to end prematurely, and had lower client satisfaction. We also identified an optimal attention score of approximately 0.4 (out of 1.0, which denotes full attention), which translates to two to three concurrent sessions. CONCLUSIONS This study provides empirical evidence for the feasibility of conducting multiple text-based sessions concurrently without compromising service quality and client experience. Our method of measuring the counselor attention allocation offers a way to systematically assess and evaluate concurrent sessions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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评估在线咨询中并行会议和咨询师注意力分配的有效性。

目标 凭借其匿名性和可访问性，基于文本的在线咨询在接触有心理健康需求的人们方面显示出巨大的潜力。为弥补服务差距而采取的一种策略是并行咨询，即每位咨询师同时照顾多名客户。迄今为止，还没有报道证据支持其合理性和有效性。这项研究调查了并发服务交付的潜在机会、有效性和注意事项，并确定了并发会话的最佳截止数量，同时将服务质量保持在设定的阈值或之上。方法 我们分析了 Open Up（一项免费的 24/7 基于文本的咨询服务）的 54,716 次在线咨询会议的记录，以制定衡量咨询师注意力分配的注意力分数，并检查咨询师的注意力分配对客户满意度的影响和服务成果。结果 平均而言，与非并发会话相比，并发会话时间更长，更有可能提前结束，并且客户满意度较低。我们还确定了大约 0.4 的最佳注意力分数（满分 1.0，表示充分注意力），这相当于两到三个并发会话。结论 本研究为在不影响服务质量和客户体验的情况下同时进行多个基于文本的会话的可行性提供了经验证据。我们测量辅导员注意力分配的方法提供了一种系统评估和评价并发会话的方法。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。