Going local and global in analyzing change in institutional practice:...

Conversation analysis has convincingly documented how the moment-by-moment sequential organization of therapeutic interaction promotes patients’ change on the local, conversational level within and across sessions (Peräkylä  2019; Bercelli et al. 2013; Voutilainen et al. 2018; Voutilainen & Peräkylä 2019). CA thereby distinguishes four interventions as change-inducing practices: the responsive actions ‘extensions’, ‘interpretations’ and ‘reformulations’ as well as the initiatory actions ‘questions’ (cf. Spranz-Fogasy 2020: 42). However, within the confines of Conversation Analysis, the interactional change potential of e.g. questioning practices cannot be linked back to the global effectiveness of the interaction, the research focus in psychological outcome research. Outcome research, in return, cannot capture how the overall effectiveness of an institutional practice such as psychotherapy is locally and sequentially co-constructed in the interaction at hand.

Integrating these two research foci – interaction and effectiveness – then seems to be a logical next step to supplement our academic understanding of how helping professions “work” and also to generate findings of practical relevance for therapists and other helping professionals. Our contribution presented an interdisciplinary project developed to analyze the local and global change potential of questioning sequences in executive coaching, a neighboring institutional practice (Graf & Spranz-Fogasy 2018; Graf 2019). The multi-methods research design, based on descriptive-phenomenological linguistic research as evinced by Conversation Analysis and Linguistische Gesprächsanalyse and on theory-guided psychological research as evinced by Qualitative Content Analysis and Inferential Statistics (Graf, Spranz-Fogasy & Künzli 2020), was  discussed as a possible template for interdisciplinary research on process and outcome in helping professions.