An Original Investigation into Therapeutic Alliance Formation in Culturally Diverse Counselling Dyads in Nigeria

Therapeutic alliance is the most consistently identified predictor of counselling outcomes across theoretical orientations, but its formation and maintenance in culturally diverse counselling dyads, where counsellor and client differ in ethnicity, religion, language, or regional background, presents specific challenges that have not been theoretically or empirically addressed in the Nigerian counselling literature. This study conducted an original theoretical and empirical investigation into therapeutic alliance formation in culturally diverse counselling dyads in Nigeria. A sequential explanatory mixed-methods design was employed, combining quantitative alliance measurement with qualitative phenomenological investigation. The quantitative phase collected data from 160 counselling dyads at five counselling centres in Lagos, Kano, Enugu, and Abuja, with therapist-client ethnic and religious similarity systematically coded. The Working Alliance Inventory-Short Revised was administered to both clients and counsellors at session three and session eight. The qualitative phase conducted in-depth interviews with 30 counsellors and 28 clients from culturally discordant dyads. Quantitative results showed no significant main effect of ethnic or religious discordance on alliance quality (contrary to Western findings) after controlling for counsellor cultural competence. Counsellor cultural competence significantly moderated the discordance-alliance relationship (interaction p < 0.01). Qualitative analysis identified three alliance formation mechanisms specific to Nigerian cross-cultural dyads: explicit cultural acknowledgement (counsellors directly naming cultural differences), shared national identity activation (emphasising Nigerian commonality over ethnic difference), and linguistic accommodation (adjusting language register, code-switching). The study generates original theoretical propositions about Nigerian-specific alliance formation processes constituting an original contribution. Keywords: therapeutic alliance, culturally diverse dyads, Nigeria, mixed-methods, counselling outcomes