Abstract
This chapter aims to promote dialogue between discursively-oriented researchers and therapists, by exploring reflexive questions as a specific discursive therapy practice that can be used to co-construct preferred understandings of clients’ relationships, identities, experiences, and actions. From a discursive psychology approach, we suggest that the constructive potential of reflexive questions rests in triggering and accomplishing preferred (acceptable and helpful) formulations of such self-understandings. In our view, this type of preferred attribution work is therapeutic in that it conversationally accomplishes client-preferred meanings and fosters clients’ autonomy and capacity to generate change on their own. In order to empirically demonstrate these therapeutic effects, we use a discursive psychological approach to analyze exemplars of reflexive questions. Based on our suggestion that understanding therapy outcomes and client’s agency can be seen as situated conversational accomplishment, we end discussing some methodological, theoretical and ethical implications for therapy research and practice.
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Notes
- 1.
Discursive researchers have studied “preference” emphasizing how people construct their talk as more or less preferred (see Pomerantz & Heritage, 2013). For example, how speakers select certain ways of talking with particular interlocutors (“recipient design”) or how certain kinds of initiating actions (invitations) normatively prefer or “expect” particular kinds of responses (acceptance). Notably conversation analysts relate preference to affiliation, or responses that endorse the teller’s point of view (Lindström & Sorjonen, 2013). Since we focus on attribution , affiliation is the interactional phenomenon closest to our interest—generation of preferred meaning.
- 2.
These are English translations of data from a research project funded by the Government of Chile, Fondecyt project No. 11150198, approved by Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez’ local Board of Ethics. Names are pseudonyms. Project involves the study of family therapy involving children with “disruptive behaviors.” Data for this chapter were simplified to better suit its aims.
- 3.
Numbers in parenthesis indicate time in seconds. Square parenthesis [ ] indicates an overlap of talk between J and T. Parenthesis ( ) indicates non-verbals. Talk between ° ° is quieter than surrounding talk (e.g., whispering). The sign “=” marks no discernible pause between the end of a speaker’s utterance and the start of the next utterance.
- 4.
Hepburn and Potter (2012) characterize tremulous or wobbly delivery and aspiration as “a feature of speakers’ attempts to talk through a crying episode” (p. 198), which seemed to be the case here. Sniffs were audible, defined as “inhalation, with the addition of various voiced vowels and consonants, caused by nasal or ‘wet’ sounds” (pp. 197–198).
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Acknowledgment
Work on this chapter was supported by funding received from CONICYT, Fondecyt Program No. 11150198.
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Gaete, J., Smoliak, O., Couture, S. (2018). Reflexive Questions as Constructive Interventions: A Discursive Perspective. In: Smoliak, O., Strong, T. (eds) Therapy as Discourse. The Language of Mental Health. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93067-1_6
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