This study was an exploration of school consultation interactions between instructional consultants and consultees. Of specific interest was how consultants (n = 18) and consultees (n = 18) used verb tense and emotion words during the problem identification and analysis instructional consultation stage, similarities and differences in communication patterns, and whether verb tense and emotion words were related to perceptions of collaboration, consultee outcomes, or client outcomes. Data provided mixed support for study hypotheses. Among the findings, consultants' past tense verb use negatively correlated with the consultation relationship (r = −.62, p = .01), consultees' present tense use correlated with better consultee outcomes (r = .49, p = .05), and positive emotion word use by consultees was correlated with better consultee outcomes (r = .54, p = .05). Implications of these and other findings are explored in the context of interpersonal communication during school consultation. C 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.In schools, consultation is a form of indirect educational and mental health service delivery involving a professional with specialized knowledge and skills (i.e., a consultant) working with a staff member or parent (i.e., a consultee) to support client (i.e., student) needs (Erchul & Sheridan, 2014). Communication interactions are at the heart of consultation, forming interpersonal bridges between consultants and consultees and mediating consultation outcomes. A long history of published research on relational communication in behavioral consultation (BC) has demonstrated that interpersonal interactions/communication make meaningful differences in collaborative problem solving (Erchul, Grissom, Getty, & Bennett, 2014). However, this body of research is limited due to its focus primarily on a single consultation model and a narrow area of interpersonal communication . This exploratory study is an attempt to extend the consultation communication research base by investigating an instructional consultation (IC) approach instead of BC, measuring new dimensions of communication (i.e., affective language and verb tense), and applying an innovative computational linguistics approach, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) analysis.The study follows up on previous research by Newman, Guiney, and Barrett (2015), which found pronoun usage to be a meaningful factor in school consultation interactions. In the current study, independent variables of interest included consultant and consultee verb tense and emotion words, both of which have been demonstrated to be significant units of analysis in social psychology and communication research (Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010), but have not yet been extensively investigated in school psychology. Dependent variables of interest included consultation outcomes for consultees (teachers) and clients (students), as well as collaboration in the consultation relationship.
Language Analysis in ConsultationRelational communication refers to one speaker's position (e.g., control/sub...