Requesting Examples in Psychodiagnostic Interviews

Abstract

As part of a larger research project on understanding change in helping professions, this paper investigates into therapists’ requesting examples and their interactional and sequential contri-bution to clients’ change. Requesting examples by therapists in psychodiagnostic interviews explicitly or implicitly criticize the patient’s prior turn as insufficient, i.e. as unclear, vague, or as too general. Such a request opens a retro-sequence (Schegloff 2007) and in the following provides for a description that both helps clarify the semantic vagueness and evinces psychic or relational aspects of the topic at hand. While the patient’s insufficient presentation is initi-ated by a prior request of the therapist, the patient’s example presentation is regularly fol-lowed by the therapist’s summarizing comments or by further requests focusing on the pa-tient’s problem. Requesting examples thus are a particular case of requests that follow ‘ex-pandable responses’ as described by Muntigl & Zabala (2008); they follow the same sequential organization, yet, given that they make examples conditionally relevant, they are more specif-ic. With the help of this sequential organization both participants co-construct elements of common knowledge. Such an ‘interplay of understanding’ (Voutilainen & Peräkylä 2014) al-lows the therapist to pursue the overall aim of therapy, i.e. to increase the patients’ awareness of their distorted perceptions, and thus to pave the way for change. The data comprises of 16 videotaped first interviews following the manual of the Operationalized Psychodynamic Di-agnostics (OPD Task Force 2009). It was collected in cooperation with the Clinic for General Internal Medicine and Psychosomatic at the University Clinic of Heidelberg.

Relationship management by means of solution-oriented questions in German psychodiagnostic interviews

“…In our corpus we found 27 SOQs in twelve interviews. Other question types not discussed here were 33 explicit Requesting Examples and 57 Questions for Collaborative Explanation Finding (Spranz-Fogasy et al 2020). The SOQs were analyzed by means of Conversation Analysis (Sidnell and Stivers 2013) and German Gesprächsanalyse 2 (Deppermann 2008).…”

“…In addition, the following other question types were identified: Requesting Example (cf. Spranz-Fogasy et al 2020), Questions for Collaborative Explanation Finding (cf. Mack et al 2016) and Solution-Oriented Questions (cf.…”

“Now once again this idea of yours (…) how does it sound when I say that?” – Changing the perspective: how coach’s questioning practices elicit self-reflecting processes in clients

“…Questioning practices have particular transformational powers in helping professions like coaching. Not only are questions regarded as a fundamental instrument for controlling and structuring the conversation (Deplazes, 2016;Jautz et al, 2023), they also enable coaches to evoke self-reflection processes in clients and thus drive the coaching-immanent change project (Graf and Spranz-Fogasy, 2018b;Spranz-Fogasy et al, 2019). Schreyögg (2012) therefore names asking questions as the most important task of a coach, while Tracy and Robles (2009, p. 131) also describe questioning as "one of, if not the, central communicative practice of institutional encounters. "…”

“…Schreyögg (2012) therefore names asking questions as the most important task of a coach, while Tracy and Robles (2009, p. 131) also describe questioning as "one of, if not the, central communicative practice of institutional encounters. " Coaches have a wide repertoire of questioning actions to stimulate selfreflection in clients and thus successfully advance the coaching change project (Bercelli et al, 2008;Muntigl and Zabala, 2008;Graf and Spranz-Fogasy, 2018a;Spranz-Fogasy et al, 2019). This transformational power of questioning practices in coaching has been asserted in the practice literature for many years, but there is little empirical research on the change potential of reflection-stimulating techniques used by coaches (Peräkylä, 2019;Graf et al, 2023b;Fleischhacker and Graf, 2024).…”