5. Limitations
ORI, confusion
Several limitations of this study need to be mentioned. The sample size was small and lacked socioeconomic diversity. Although group leaders attended weekly 1.5 h supervision meetings, and the supervisor had immediate and routine access to the creators of both group interventions if technical questions arose, we did not systematically check adherence to the manuals of the two group interventions. Most school settings do not permit video or audio-recording equipment in school settings for research or clinical purposes.We also used a relatively crude coding system that consisted of positive and negative affects of the four mental representations. Although the PANAS-SF is established to accurately detect positive and negative affective valence, its use in the open-ended ORI meant that certain responses did not have a corresponding descriptor from the PANAS-SF. For instance, the phrase “my mom is a nurse” does not have a descriptor from the PANAS-SF. Hence, these types of responses were not coded for affective valence. Despite this drawback, we are confident that we were able to identify the affective valence of most responses using this approach. Further research should assess the precision of the responses and create clearer categories for positive and negative responses. Coding responses for level of differentiation-relatedness (e.g., checking for incoherence and confusion in the self representation; [