'Collaborative Tailoring' in Interaction

How Do Therapists Pose Questions to Clients about Therapeutic Methods? Using Conversation Analysis to Investigate ‘Collaborative Tailoring’ in Interaction Sarah Cantwell, Dr John Rae, Dr Joel Vos & Professor Mick Cooper

Clients' responses to therapists' reinterpretations

• Research has consistently shown that therapists should try to

tailor the therapy:

(Bercelli et al., 2008)

collaboratively with an active client on the basis of the client’s personality, culture and preferences.” (Norcross & Lambert, 2011, p.10) “

Demonstrates how social actions are actually accomplished in real-life interactions. Findings based only on the interactional evidence available to the people in the interaction.

• e.g. through discussion about the client’s preferred therapeutic methods (Cooper & McLeod, 2011)

Requires bracketing of assumptions in therapeutic theories, which can highlight recurring, tacit features of how clients and therapists interact

• Existing research on collaborative tailoring is based on remembered examples of therapeutic interactions, leading to possibly imprecise and limited findings.

•

Project Aim: to highlight interactional practices

(Polkinghorne, 1992)

(Madill, 2015).

actually used by clients and therapists when doing one form of collaborative tailoring i.e. the discussion of therapeutic methods.

Therapeutic relationship in action: How therapists and clients co-manage relational disaffiliation (Muntigl & Horvath, 2014)

Prosody and empathic communication in psychotherapy interaction (Weiste & Peräkylä, 2014)

• 30 hours of audio-recordings • 6 dyads (4 therapists; 6 clients), engaged in

pluralistic psychotherapy (Cooper & McLeod, 2011). • Identified and transcribed 11 cases (across 4 therapeutic dyads; 3 therapists; 10 sessions) where: the therapist poses a question to the client about the client’s preferred therapeutic methods. • 8/11 cases occurred in either the assessment session or in the 3 subsequent sessions.

Question design and trajectory show therapist and client treating it as ‘non-straightforward’: • Therapists always use hesitation markers and repairs when asking the question, which shows them orienting to some interactional delicacy in asking the question. • Clients extremely frequently (9/11 cases) display difficultly in responding and/or furnishing a substantive answer, • therefore treating the question as something they may not be epistemically entitled to answer (Heritage, 2012).

Despite their display of difficulty, clients usually (10/11 cases) collaborate with the question’s topic shift to discussing therapeutic methods.

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