Coaching Research in 2020

After Part I of Coaching Research in 2020 (Graf & Dionne, 2021) summarized research on the destination(s) of coaching in the context of quantitative psychological outcome research, Part II will look beyond outcomes and effectiveness. It calls for more research on the coaching process itself, that is, on the journey of coaching and its travelers. To this end, we first explore the different research foci in the change-process-research paradigm of coaching (Wegener et al., 2018). Next, the paper argues for the necessity to engage more in qualitative process research to carve out how coach and client locally, i.e., on the conversational micro-level, interact with each other on a moment-to-moment basis along individual coaching sessions and entire coaching processes. We introduce qualitative linguistic coaching process research (Graf, 2015, 2018, 2019). This research paradigm addresses the coaching micro-level und investigates how the local effectiveness of coaching emerges from the turn-by-turn verbal interaction between coach and client on the basis of the sequentiality and the intersubjectivity of the coaching conversation. While coaching research and practice will benefit immensely from such an in-depth, qualitative linguistic analysis of authentic coaching interaction, this paper ends with a call for research that addresses and relates both the global effectiveness and the interaction of coaching. The TSPP (Turn–Sequence–Phase–Process) Model (Deplazes et al., 2018), which integrates concepts from quantitative psychological outcome research and qualitative linguistic process research, is presented. This model also allows for relating coaching effectiveness and interaction. The TSPP Model also underlies a very recent interdisciplinary, mixed-methods research project on questioning sequences in coaching (Graf, Spranz-Fogasy & Künzli, 2020), which will be briefly sketched out in the final part.