Working Alliance Inventory (WAI)

The Working Alliance Inventory was originally created by Horvath and Greenberg in 1989 to assess the quality of the alliance between therapist and client.

When it comes to successful therapy, we have known for years that the relationship between therapist and client matters greatly. The therapeutic approach that you use does not matter as much – the connection you build makes all the difference. Back in 1979, Bordin broke this alliance down into three parts: goals (what the therapist and client want to achieve), tasks (how they will get there), and bond (the trust and connection between them).

The Working Alliance Inventory (WAI) provides a way to check how these elements are developing in the therapeutic relationships. By measuring them, problems can be spotted early, adjustments made when needed, and ultimately better care provided for clients. In these sections, we will explore different versions of this tool and how they can be used in your practice.

What Are the Three Components of the Working Alliance?

Returning to Bordin’s conceptualization mentioned earlier, the three components of the working alliance merit deeper exploration, as they form the theoretical foundation for all WAI versions.

1. Agreement on Goals

Think of goal agreement as therapist and client getting on the same page about what they’re actually trying to accomplish. Are they working toward reducing panic attacks? Improving relationships? Exploring childhood patterns? Without this shared vision, therapy often wanders or hits dead ends.

When therapist and client see eye-to-eye on goals, outcomes improve dramatically. Unfortunately, goal misalignment happens all too often. Sometimes goals stay frustratingly vague (“I want to feel better”). Other times, clients show up with someone else’s goals—what their doctor or spouse thinks they need. Occasionally, expectations simply don’t match reality, with clients hoping for quick fixes to complex problems.

A real-life example brings this to life: A CBT therapist felt increasingly frustrated with a physician-referred client seeking anxiety help. Sessions went nowhere until WAI results revealed the disconnect—while the therapist pushed anxiety management techniques, the client desperately wanted to understand why he was anxious in the first place. Once they discovered this mismatch, they crafted a blended approach that addressed both needs, finally gaining traction.

2. Agreement on Tasks

Task agreement means both parties understand and accept the “how” of therapy. Will they use exposure exercises? Talk about needs? Practice new communication skills? Role-play difficult conversations? For this dimension to work, clients need both intellectual understanding (“I get what we’re doing”) and emotional buy-in (“I’m willing to try this approach”).

Smart therapists strengthen task agreement through several strategies. Explaining the “why” behind therapeutic methods helps enormously. So does explicitly connecting specific exercises to the client’s stated goals. Regularly checking comfort levels and adjusting approaches based on feedback prevents unnecessary resistance.

One therapist encountered this firsthand when her usually talkative client grew increasingly silent during sessions. WAI results pointed to poor task agreement. When gently explored, the client admitted feeling confused about “just talking” with no clear structure or homework. The therapist took time explaining how cognitive restructuring connects to the client’s goal of understanding relationship patterns. This simple clarification transformed their sessions, with the client engaging enthusiastically once understanding the method’s purpose.

3. Bond

The bond dimension captures the human connection in therapy—that sense of trust, acceptance, and mutual respect. Unlike the other components, bond relates less to therapy content and more to the relationship quality itself.

Though professional in nature, therapeutic bonds share elements with other meaningful human connections. Genuine empathy matters enormously. So does authentic positive regard—that sense that the therapist truly values the client as a person. Emotional attunement, appropriate boundaries, and simple reliability round out this crucial dimension.

A substance abuse counselor working with court-mandated clients saw this play out dramatically. Recognizing bond as her biggest challenge with resistant clients, she used WAI bond items as a relationship-building checklist. She doubled down on consistency, non-judgment, and genuine interest in clients’ lives beyond their substance use. Gradually, even the most reluctant clients began reporting stronger bond scores on the WAI. Interestingly, as bond scores improved, agreement on tasks and goals followed—suggesting that sometimes connection must precede the more technical aspects of therapeutic work.

Working Alliance Inventory: Therapist Version

The therapist version of the WAI enables therapists to rate the quality of working relationships with clients.

The therapist form contains 36 items, 12 for each of the three alliance components proposed by Bordin: Goals, Tasks, Bond. Thus, therapists indicate on seven-point Likert scale staples ranging from 1 (Never) to 7 (Always) for each item.

Some example items from the therapist version include:

• “My client and I both feel confident about the usefulness of our current activity in therapy.” (Tasks)
• “We agree on what is important for my client to work on.” (Goals)
• “I believe my client likes me.” (Bond)

The therapist version is especially helpful for clinical supervision, self-reflection, and research applications. Through administering the WAI therapists receive feedback regarding their own perception of the therapeutic relationship, and they learn how to compare it with the client’s rating. This knowledge can inform modifications in treatment strategy.

Take a therapist, who started to observe his client Sarah pushing back during their sixth session together. After completing the WAI therapist version, he became aware that he also obtained a low score in the Goals subscale. This led him to use the following session to revisit and clarify treatment goals with Sarah, and the client became more involved.

Development and Validation of a Revised Short Version of the Working Alliance Inventory

Working Alliance Inventory-Short Form (WAI-S)

The WAI-Short Form (WAI-S) was developed by Tracey and Kokotovic in 1989 to provide a faster assessment tool while maintaining the psychometric properties of the original instrument. This short version contains 12 items selected from the original 36, with four items representing each dimension (Goals, Tasks, and Bond).

The WAI-S significantly reduces administrative burden while maintaining strong correlations with the full version. Like the original version, the WAI-S uses a 7-point Likert scale, and it yields both subscale scores and a total alliance score. The abbreviated format makes it practical for regular use in clinical settings where time constraints often pose challenges.

A therapist running a busy community mental health practice might use the WAI-S regularly to track alliance development over time. This approach helps identify patterns or sudden shifts in the therapeutic relationship that warrant attention.

Working Alliance Inventory Short Revised (WAI-SR)

The Working Alliance Inventory-Short Revised (WAI-SR) is a revision of the WAI-S, developed by Hatcher and Gillaspy in 2006. The authors wanted to improve the psychometric properties of the short form by selecting items based on factor analysis rather than simply choosing representative items from the original scale.

The WAI-SR maintains the 12-item structure but features some different items from the WAI-S. The revisions aimed to reduce item overlap and improve the distinction between subscales.

Sample items from the WAI-SR Client’s Version include:

• “As a result of these sessions I am clearer as to how I might be able to change.”
• “My therapist and I agree on what is important for me to work on”
• “I believe my therapist likes me.”

A trauma therapist working with veterans might choose the WAI-SR over other versions because of its refined ability to distinguish between agreement on tasks versus goals—a distinction particularly important when deciding on different approaches to pursue the same goal.

Brief Revised Working Alliance Inventory

The Brief Alliance Inventory (BAI) represents a significant evolution in alliance measurement, introduced by Mallinckrodt and Tekie in 2015. Unlike previous adaptations that simply shortened the original WAI, the BAI was specifically developed to address limitations in existing short forms while maximizing measurement precision across the full spectrum of alliance quality.

The BAI includes 16 items organized into two subscales rather than three: an 8-item Bond dimension and an 8-item combined Tasks/Goals dimension. This structure resulted from Item Response Theory (IRT) techniques, which prioritized empirical performance over strict adherence to Bordin’s traditional alliance model.

One notable innovation in the BAI is its response format. Positively worded items use a 5-point Likert-type scale (1=seldom to 5=always), while negatively worded items have a 4-point collapsed scale that addresses poor response discrimination. The developers also carefully selected items to ensure the measure performs consistently across diverse client populations, enhancing its fairness and inclusivity regardless of sex or ethnicity.

The BAI offers greater sensitivity throughout the alliance spectrum compared to the WAI-S and WAI-SR, improving discrimination among clients with both weak and strong alliances. This makes it particularly valuable for session-by-session monitoring in clinical settings where detecting subtle alliance shifts can guide intervention adjustments.

It’s worth noting that the BAI is not a direct theoretical substitute for previous WAI variants. Rather, it represents a different approach that prioritizes measurement precision over theoretical symmetry. For clinicians and researchers primarily concerned with obtaining the most psychometrically robust alliance measurements in time-limited contexts, the BAI offers a compelling alternative to earlier short forms.

Working Alliance Inventory Observer Form

The Observer version of the Working Alliance Inventory (WAI-O) allows third parties to rate the alliance between therapist and client. Developed based on the original scale, this version provides an external perspective on therapeutic interactions.

The WAI-O consists of 36 items similar to those of the original WAI but reworded to reflect an observer’s perspective. Trained raters typically review recorded therapy sessions or observe sessions live, evaluating the apparent working relationship.

The observer version offers several advantages, particularly for research and supervision contexts:

• Provides an objective perspective free from self-report biases
• Allows for assessment when client self-report is impractical (e.g., with certain populations)
• Helps in supervision sessions

A realistic application: In a training clinic, supervisors might use the WAI-O while reviewing session recordings with psychology trainees. This creates rich opportunities for discussing specific moments that strengthen or weaken the alliance. For instance, a supervisor might note, “I scored this exchange quite high on the Task dimension because you checked for understanding after introducing the exposure hierarchy. Did you notice how the client’s body language shifted from tense to relaxed after that clarification?”

Working Alliance Inventory Scoring

Scoring the WAI requires understanding both its structure and the meaning behind the numbers. The original WAI contains 36 items divided equally across the Tasks, Bond, and Goals subscales, with each item rated on a 7-point scale from “Never” (1) to “Always” (7). In the full version, subscale scores range from 12-84 and total scores from 36-252.

The shorter versions are rated differently. The short forms, WAI-S and WAI-SR, contain 12 items total, with scores ranging from 12 to 84. The Brief Alliance Inventory (BAI) has 16 items, so the maximum score is 112.

Careful attention must be paid to reverse-scored items, which have negative polarity. To reverse-score, subtract the original rating from 8 (e.g., a 2 becomes 6). This ensures that scores consistently indicate stronger alliances across all items.

When interpreting scores, context matters significantly. A total of 60 on the WAI-SR might indicate an exceptionally strong alliance for a client with attachment trauma but suggest room for improvement with someone who forms relationships easily. Alliance scores typically follow patterns throughout therapy—rising in early sessions, potentially dipping during challenging middle-phase work, and often increasing again during termination. Sudden score drops deserve special attention as potential alliance ruptures.

Conclusion

The Working Alliance Inventory serves as an essential tool for measuring the therapeutic relationship between clinician and client. Available in formats ranging from comprehensive 36-item assessments to brief 6-item session measures, the WAI helps therapists understand relationship dynamics through three core elements. When therapists acknowledge these alliance components, they gain clarity on challenging clinical situations—recognizing goal misalignment rather than resistance, understanding task confusion behind disengagement, and measuring progress in building trust. While therapeutic approaches continually evolve, strong therapeutic relationships remain fundamental to healing across all orientations.

The WAI’s true value lies not merely in its metrics but in how it anchors professionals to the essentials of effective therapy: authentic connection, mutual agreement on treatment direction, and collaborative methodology. In today’s clinical environment of documentation and protocols, alliance measures remind us that human connection remains the foundation of therapeutic success.

References

Bordin, E. S. (1979). The generalizability of the psychoanalytic concept of the working alliance. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 16(3), 252–260. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0085885

Hatcher, R. L., & Gillaspy, J. A. (2006). Development and validation of a revised short version of the Working Alliance Inventory. Psychotherapy Research, 16(1), 12–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/10503300500352500

Horvath, A. O. (n.d.). WAI Home. Working Alliance Inventory. https://wai.profhorvath.com/

Horvath, A. O., & Greenberg, L. S. (1989). Development and validation of the Working Alliance Inventory. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 36(2), 223–233. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.36.2.223

Mallinckrodt, B., & Tekie, Y. T. (2016). Item response theory analysis of Working Alliance Inventory, revised response format, and new Brief Alliance Inventory. Psychotherapy research : journal of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, 26(6), 694–718. https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2015.1061718

Tichenor, V., & Hill, C. E. (1989). A comparison of six measures of working alliance. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 26(2), 195–199. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0085419

Tracey, T. J., & Kokotovic, A. M. (1989). Working Alliance Inventory—Short Form (WAI) [Database record]. APA PsycTests. https://doi.org/10.1037/t03814-000