The concept of the therapeutic alliance and its operationalization have received much attention in recent years. One of the early self-report measures of the therapeutic alliance was the Helping Alliance questionnaire (HAq-I). This scale was recently revised to exclude the items that explicitly reflect improvement. Using the revised 19-item HAq-II on a sample of 246 patients diagnosed with DSM-III-R cocaine dependence, the authors found that the new scale had excellent internal consistency and test-retest reliability. Further, the HAq-II demonstrated good convergent validity with the California Psychotherapy Alliance Scale (CALPAS) total score. Alliance levels as measured by the CALPAS or the Helping Alliance questionnaire during early sessions were not associated with pretreatment psychiatric severity or level of depression.