Accomplishments in Social Constructionist Counseling: Micro-analytic and Retrospective Analyses

Accomplishments & counseling11/25/2022 1

Running Head: ACCOMPLISHMENTS & COUNSELING

Accomplishments in social constructionist counseling: Micro-analytic and retrospective analyses

By Tom Strong, PhD, Associate Professor

Division of Applied Psychology

Faculty of Education

University of Calgary

2500 University Way Dr. NW

Calgary, Alberta. Canada T2N 1N4

e-mail:[email protected]

(Revised manuscript: November 22, 2005)

Special thanks to Don Zeman, Shari Couture and Mirjam Knapik& to the University of Calgary for funding this study


Abstract

Social constructionist interventions in counseling have seldom been evaluated using

theoretically compatible research methods. In this exploratory study, 11 clients participated in 1-

hour lifestyle consultations conducted by narrative, solution-focused collaborative language

systems counselors. The interventions (co-constructing shared understandings, inviting

reflections, and introducing new discourses) were primarily evaluated using conversation

analysis. Clients and counselors were also asked to retrospectively comment on their experience

in videotaped passages where they had been participants. An example of each analyzed

intervention, along with corresponding client and counselor commentary, is presented. The

results are discussed in relation to training and supervision in social constructionist approaches to

counseling, and for contributions this approach to research can make in widening the evidence

base for counseling interventions.


…constructionist social science would benefit from taking seriously the issue of

construction. Rather than treating construction as a taken-for-granted start point, it should

consider construction and deconstruction as a central and researchable feature of human

affairs.

(Potter, 1996, p. 206)

Social constructionist approaches to counseling are a generation old. These approaches –

primarily narrative, solution-focused and collaborative language systems therapy – are

commonly featured in the curricula and textbooks (e.g., McLeod, 2003; Prochaska & Norcross,

2003) of graduate courses in counseling. Particularly striking about these approaches is a key

shared premise: knowledge is seen as constructed, deconstructed or upheld in social and cultural

interaction (Gergen, 1999). Dialogue is an influential site of such interaction and the principal

therapist-authors of these approaches focus on clients’ and counselors’ meanings and ways of

talking (Anderson, 1997; deShazer, 1994; White & Epston, 1990). Counselors taking up this

discursive turn bring a pragmatic, process-oriented focus to how their dialogues with clients

‘talk’ some understandings and actions into greater significance than others (Strong, 2002).

Some see an ethical dimension in this discursive turn, with meanings and actions collaboratively

developed to fit clients’ preferences or senses of viability (Madsen, 1999; Weingarten, 1991).

The study reported here examines two assertions of social constructionist approaches to

counseling: 1) that counseling dialogue constructs, sustains or deconstructs clients’

understandings and 2) that this happens in ways experienced as collaboration by clients.

Context

Conversation, for social constructionists, is primarily where and how people construct

“common ground” (Clark, 1996) with each other, but they can alter that “ground” through their


talking. How this constructing occurs should be evident in observable accomplishments arising

from and within the talk of clients and counselors in how they create “conversational realities”

(Shotter, 1993) embedded in social and cultural realities beyond the immediate counseling

encounter. This postmodern focus on humans constructing ‘reality’ has been contentious in the

social sciences and society (Sampson, 1993) and is traceable to developments in discourse theory

and hermeneutics (Foucault, 1972; Gadamer, 1988). This focus suggests knowledge and social

interaction are best understood in historico-cultural context and not as incomplete or misguided

steps in modern science’s pursuit of objective truth (Kuhn, 1970; Lyotard, 1984). Wittgenstein

straddled both sides of this postmodern debate; straining to articulate a linguistically correct, if

not idealized, map of reality (1961/1922), then abandoning such efforts to focus on how people

use everyday languages to suit their relational purposes (1958). Wittgenstein’s latter approach

informs the study undertaken here. How counselors and clients collaboratively use words and

ways of talking to accomplish particular outcomes is scrutinized in two ways: 1) in

microanalyses of actual counselor-client dialogue, and 2) in clients’ and counselors’

retrospective accounts of their participation in videotaped passages selected for microanalysis.

Researching conversation’s practices and accomplishments

Few studies examine social constructionist approaches to counseling using theoretically

compatible research methods. As counseling and psychotherapy increasingly emulate evidence-

based medicine (Division 12 Task Force, 1995), needed are ways to show how and that its

approaches make differences in clients’ lives. One direction sees the interventions practiced tied

to manualized protocols that can be reliably administered and measured (Dobson & Craig, 1998).

Such a direction, however, can “collide” with the normal pragmatics of actual practice (Beutler,

2000) because therapeutic dialogue seems to defy such regimentation. Social constructionist


counselors, while noted for their techniques (e.g., “miracle questions”, “re-authoring” questions,

or “not-knowing” curiosity), see intervention in dialogic terms. These conversational

interventions are best seen as invitations or proposals made, then hopefully, worked out (or

negotiated) in the back-and-forth dialogue. Questions, for example, have been identified as

“interventive” (Tomm, 1988) for what they can elicit in dialogue. A ‘monologic’ intervention,

conversely, would be something done to clients in ways that imply unidirectional causality. As

related to counseling, a monologic interaction would be one where counselors direct or correct

clients, whereas a dialogic interaction would feature collaboration between clients and

counselors based on their reciprocal influence on each other. Measuring ‘monologic’

interventions as actions done by counselors to clients for their effects has been parodied

elsewhere for being premised on a “drug metaphor” (Stiles & Shapiro, 1989). Dialogic

interactions in counseling are phenomena where socially constructive developments are

empirically observable in the active interpretive practices speakers use in dialogue’s back-and-

forth immediacies with each other (Heritage, 1984; Ten Have, 1999).

While social constructionist research methods have been increasingly developed (Denzin

& Lincoln, 2000), studies of social interaction have been primarily been undertaken by

ethnomethodologically-inspired conversation and discourse analysts (Edwards & Potter, 1992;

Sacks, 1995; Ten Have, 1999). Drawing from Garfinkel (1967), Goffman (1967), and

Wittgenstein’s (1958) linguistic philosophy, conversation analysis (CA) was inaugurated by

Harvey Sacks (1995, Silverman, 1999). Sacks saw conversation’s regularities in technological

terms, as “architectures of inter-subjectivity” (Silverman, 1997), in how people “do” particular

relational transactions, like answering the phone, or turn-taking in conversation (Sacks,

Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974). Worth noting is the dialogic language here; the phenomena studied


are seen as interactional accomplishments, as individuals use language for relational purposes -

“doing” things with their words and ways of communicating (Austin, 1962). A central focus is

on how people use communications to both sustain relatedness and pursue personal aims.

Coordinating such aims through how speakers take their turns at talk (i.e., how they do or don’t

take up on what a speaker says in the turn prior to theirs) is an important feature of this study.

CA researchers attempt to understand how speakers influence and make sense of each

other by turning to the same communicated ‘data’ that guide the speakers as they talk. How a

speaker is understood should be evident in how the ‘listener’ responds or in what is known in CA

as the “next turn proof procedure” (Ten Have, 1999). People familiar with each other develop a

backdrop or “common ground” of understanding, ways of anticipating and affirming each other’s

ways of talking and meaning (Clark, 1996). For people unfamiliar with each other there are

greater interpretive challenges since they bring different interpretive histories to conversations.

Such can be the case with counseling, though some critics are concerned about counselors’

propensities for restricting the conversation to their theoretically or institutionally-bound

discourse (Parker, 1999; Rose, 1990). Here some social constructionist counselors claim to work

within client discourses, eschewing discourses of professional expertise for assessing what

clients say and formulating related interventions (Anderson & Goolishian, 1992). Other

constructionist counselors democratize their practice, inviting clients to inquire or comment on

their modifiable ways of practice, or to actively participate in ‘naming’ clinically relevant

experiences (e.g., Madigan, 1993, Madsen, 1999). Such collaborative efforts show a regard for

the “politics of meaning” in the client-counselor relationship (Weingarten, 1991). Collaboration

should be observable in how client and counselor pursue particular conversational outcomes.


It is important to identify how the theoretical stances informing CA and the social

constructionist approaches to counseling can be seen as related given the diversity within CA and

the counseling approaches studied here. The greatest commonality relates to the centrality of

language and conversational practice to not only shared understanding, but to sociality itself.

Communications are the means by which people in relationship coordinate their coexistence and

work out shared projects, counseling being one such project. Many social constructionist

counselors see the kinds of linguistic coordination just described as occurring at a cultural level

(Pare, 2002), that the understandings and ways of talking clients (and counselors) present come

‘located’ in cultural discourses. In accord with CA theorists, these counselors are mindful of

‘local’ ways of talking and that there is no correct way to either represent experience or talk

about it. With this in mind, social constructionist counselors (e.g., Friedman, 1993) seek

collaborative and constructive conversations that presumably take clients beyond past ways of

understanding and talking that were not helping them attain personal goals. How clients and

counselors collaboratively use language to construct new ways of talking (in this case, the

interventions under study) and understanding befitting clients’ goals should be an empirical

endeavor that CA helps make evident.

Studies of counselors’ and clients’ interactions are not new (Reutsch & Bateson, 1951;

Labov & Waletzky, 1977; Watzlawick, Bavelas & Jackson, 1967). Non-counselors typically

examine how counseling discourse is managed to meet institutional or professional prerogatives

(Fisher, 1984, Peyrot, 1995). Counselors have used CA to examine the conversational practices

of Carl Rogers (Wickman & Campbell, 2003), those used in turn-taking during vocational testing

(Reed, Patton & Gold, 1993), and to conceptualize the therapeutic alliance (Kozart, 2003).

Studies of collaboration between clients and counselors have looked, for example, at the ‘co-


construction’ of problems (Buttny, 1996), the development of a conversational theme in

psychodynamic counseling (Madill & Barkham, 1997), or co-narration in ensuring participants

in family counseling have a voice (Aronsson & Cederborg, 1994). Rarer still are studies that

examine social constructionist counseling using conversation or discourse analysis (exceptions:

Gale, 1990; Kogan, 1998; Kogan & Gale, 1997).

CA can bring a micro-analytic lens to study details relevant to speakers in informing their

participation in the course of their dialogues (Ten Have, 1999). Through details transcribed from

audio- or video-tapes, at tenths of a second, one can acquire a slow-motion, up-close look at

features of communication relevant to speakers as they talk. But, key to CA and the social

constructionist approaches to counseling – is a necessary selectivity in what is oriented and

responded to: much important communication and understanding occurs in taken for granted

ways that involve passing over many alternatives. Indeed, well-shared “common ground”

consists of many such understandings and ways of communicating that may only be recognized

when disrupted (Clark, 1996; Garfinkel, 1967). Face-to-face interactions are fraught with

conversational work, as speakers selectively co-manage their communications in ways befitting

their circumstances and each other (Goffman, 1967). In CA terms, they renew the context of

their relatedness with each turn in their speaking (Heritage, 1984), joining with or departing from

the prior speaker’s utterance, as shown in a couple studies I will briefly review.

David Silverman (2001) examined counseling for patients at an HIV clinic. At different

stages of the interview counselors asked clients about morally charged topics, like their sexual

behaviour. Silverman was interested in how counselors and clients talked about such matters, in

what he termed “the co-construction of delicate objects”. His micro-analytic examination offered

a glimmer on the conversational practices (words said, gestures and tones of voice used, silence,


etc.) clients and counselors used in giving shape and talking their way through such portions of

their interviews. Outside of the counseling context, Bavelas, Coates and Johnston (2001)

examined story-narration as a dialogic activity. What they found was that narrators very much

required co-narration (i.e., active communicative acknowledgements and contributions from

‘listeners’), and that this occurred in very subtle ways that, when altered, disrupted the narrator’s

ability to tell the story. I share these two examples to highlight the dimension of co-management

raised earlier. Speakers do things with their communications to influence topics, as well as each

other’s participation in where the communications appear to be headed.

I chose to supplement my conversation analyses with interpersonal process recall (Kagan,

1975) or a modified version of what Robert Elliott (1989) described as comprehensive process

analysis (CPA). This entails using selected videotaped passages and inviting participants to

retrospectively comment on their behavior and experiences in those passages. In more specific

terms, a research assistant met with clients and counselors individually to review specific

passages of videotape where two examples of each of the three interventions (understanding,

reflection and introducing new discourses) were identified as occurring by me (i.e., according to

the earlier stated criteria). During these videotape review sessions, the participants were shown

passages in which they had been participants and asked for comments pertaining to their

experiences of the interventions shown. This, in effect, permitted a way of contrasting the

conversation analysis account I provided with those of the participating client and counselor –

for the same interventions.

My choice of CPA relates to comments I heard from colleagues about my consideration

of using CA alone: that they wanted to hear directly from clients and counselors about their

experiences, and that such voices would “thicken” what my research could report. This is despite


what some might consider a methodological incompatibility. Participating in a discussion and

talking about that discussion later are two different conversational events. In this study, clients

and counselors commented on their participation in the same passages that were selected for

microanalysis. This was done to further check with clients and counselors about their

experiences for passages of conversation I identified as collaboratively managed. So,

methodologically, three accounts of the videotaped passages selected are rendered: the first, a

conversation analyst’s account of what transpired in the actual passages, while the second and

third were the retrospective accounts by clients and counselors regarding their participation in

passages I had analysed using CA. While I, a conversation analyst, saw the passages selected

(more about the criteria used later) as collaboratively undertaken, I wanted to cross-reference my

conversation analytic understandings with those from the client and counselor involved in each

passage. This methodological move was welcomed by my counselling colleagues, while seen as

problematic by my discourse analysis colleagues for in effect comparing accounts as different as

apples and oranges. I leave it with readers to decide if this compromise to satisfy colleagues in

both camps was warranted. Still, it was in this manner, that I brought my voice as a conversation

analyst together with those of clients and counselors in what is reported here.

The method

This study explored how three common counseling practices were enacted in the back

and forth of actual counseling interactions while also hearing from the clients and counselors

who enacted those interactions. Six counselors, with graduate training, and further training and

supervision in social constructionist approaches to counseling, consulted with 11 volunteer

‘clients’ who sought the one hour consultation to discuss lifestyle issues. The counselor training

consisted of graduate coursework, workshop and/or clinical supervision in narrative, solution-


focused or collaborative language systems approaches to counseling. The consultations were

advertised in hallway posters and e-mail announcements on internal campus listserves as non-

therapeutic. Both counselors and clients volunteered knowing they would be asked to review

their videotaped participation in the consultation later with a research assistant. The consultations

took place at the University of Calgary, where client participants were all senior level

undergraduate, or graduate students. Where ‘clients’ raised serious concerns beyond the scope of

the consultation to address, referrals to mental health or counseling services were made. Clients

chose the consultation topics (e.g., career contemplation and reflection on relationships) and

counselors brought mutually agreeable closure to their consultations.

The videotaped consultations were reviewed for particular passages where three kinds of

conversational interventions were initiated by the counselor: co-developing a shared

understanding, inviting reflection on something the client has said, and introducing a new topic

or discourse. These particular interventions represent three core practices found across different

models of counseling, but in the social constructionist models each intervention has been

depicted as critical to the collaborative and constructive work of counseling. I selected

videotaped passages based on the following general criteria:

a) the counselor initiated one of these three interventions (more specifics to follow for

criteria used in selecting each kind of intervention)

b) the passages showed clients taking up their counselor’s initiative to some extent.

c) the passages showed various ways the initiative was subsequently dialogically worked

out between client and counselor (and verified as such in follow-up interviews by them).

Within two weeks of the lifestyle consultation clients and counselors independently participated

in interviews with a research assistant, using Comprehensive Process Analysis (CPA, Elliott,


1989). Specifically, each client or counselor was asked to observe 6 researcher-selected passages

(2 for each kind of intervention mentioned earlier) where these interventions seemed to have

been accomplished. For each selected passage, clients and counselors were given definitions for

each intervention (to follow) then independently asked:

a) Were you and your counselor (or client) involved in this kind of intervention?

b) If so, what indicated this happened/didn’t happen for you?

c) How was it for you to participate in this intervention?

Where clients and counselors agreed to question (a) corresponding videotaped passages

of each intervention were digitized, and then analyzed, using conversation analysis (Ten Have,

1999), a method that focuses on the turn-by-turn communicative words, actions and

accomplishments of participants in conversation. Conversation analysis microanalytically

examines speakers’ use of language across sequences of dialogue, to show how speakers orient

to, ignore, extend, negotiate and/or contest each other’s contributions to the dialogue in ways that

are consequential for what develops in and from the dialogue. Making these microdynamics of

dialogue “instructably observable” (Garfinkel, 2002) is key to the analysis. The transcripts and

analyses used are meant to highlight the often taken-for-granted features of talk attended to and

used by the speakers as they tried to be both intelligible and influential with each other. These,

for the conversation analyst, are externally recognizable features of talk, and not psychologized

explanations for what develops in dialogue. To assist with the CA microanalyses I used the free

software program “Transana” (Version 1.22) developed for discourse and conversation analysts

by researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (for website information: Woods, 2003).

This program uses a split-screen format, permitting simultaneous transcription and analyses of

digitized passages of videotaped conversation.


The results

I undertook this exploratory study to examine social constructionist counseling on social

constructionist terms and to bring my researcher’s voice together with those of clients and

counselors when evaluating the same counseling interventions. Here, for reasons of space, I will

treat my analysis of one passage from each intervention studied as discrete subsections in

reporting the results. I chose passages that met the earlier mentioned criteria and fuller accounts

of the research of each intervention can be read elsewhere (Strong, in press, Strong, Zeman &

Foskett, in press; Strong, under review).

Co-developing a shared understanding

Developing a definition for “understanding” was more complicated than I had imagined.

For starters, the Oxford English Dictionary (Simpson & Weiner, 1989) has fourteen definitions.

Adding to the complications was my preference for seeing understanding as a dialogic

accomplishment, meaning that understanding had to be shared between speakers and not a

property of one of them. One can turn to linguists and read of understanding as a feature of talk

that fits grammatical structures and speech occasions (Pinker, 1994). This generalized view,

however, is at odds with those of social constructionists and conversation analysts for whom

understanding is an activity where adequate or “perspicuous” meanings (Wittgenstein, 1958) are

worked out between speakers. Prominent conversation analyst, E. Schegloff (1991), suggested

that while one cannot know what goes on in another’s thinking there are many ways speakers

make evident when they feel misunderstood, and misunderstanding, or a need to understand

usually prompts efforts to arrive at “understanding”. This can be a disturbing portrayal: that one

can only know when one is misunderstood or inadequately understood. However, this point gets

at something philosophers like Richard Rorty (1979) have been saying for some time: words are


not mirrors of reality so we can not assume that one person’s articulated understanding

necessarily fits with another’s understanding articulated similarly. For Garfinkel (1967), this is

“indexicality”; speakers index somewhat different experiences in articulating understandings.

When considered in the context of this study, understanding was regarded as a matter for

speakers to gauge from each other’s acknowledgements. Where a “common ground” (Clark,

1996) of articulated experiences exists between speakers less effort and acknowledgement seem

required. Here a challenge for counselors and clients arises in finding common ground through

their use of language, and a focal concern of social constructionist counselors is to co-develop

(or construct) understandings that “fit” (deShazer, 1994; Freedman & Combs, 1996) or are viable

and effective for clients. Issues about veracity or correctness of understanding are problematic

for social constructionists, given that the criteria used to establish either are found outside the

counseling relationship. Since social constructionist counseling is typically not a forensic activity

or one where delusions are a clinical feature, such counselors avoid the role of ‘truth adjudicator

for clients’ (Rose, 1990). Instead, the focus is on working within the interpretations clients

present. So, I adopted the following criteria for “understanding” in selecting videotaped passages

from the consultations:

a) each passage demonstrated an effort by the counselor to summarize or clarify

something said by the client,

b) each showed efforts that seemed mutual, transacted over several conversational turns,

c) each showed some variation in how understanding was seemingly accomplished (an

accomplishment later verified in the follow-up interviews).

In total 10 exemplars met the above criteria and one is arbitrarily selected here for how it

captures the conversational work these criteria specify. The first exemplar (below) shows such


efforts between a client and counselor. Since what follows may be a first look for some readers at

a CA transcript, some explanatory comments are in order. First, the symbol system used above is

outlined in greater detail in Appendix 1. To aid in the analysis, line numbers are used, and, in

Exemplar 1 the two speakers are denoted by reference to “C” (the client) and “T” (the

counselor). The utterances made, and their accompanying nonverbal features, are transcribed in

detail (detail that varies in precision across CA studies). A high quality transcript in CA can take

many hours (20 hours labour from one hour of actual conversation) to produce given the micro-

details recorded.

Many find examining such transcripts disturbing given how unpolished talk-in-

interaction can look when rendered visual. Of importance to the analytic work here is an accurate

record of what the speakers attended and responded to in each other’s communications. Thus,

such seemingly insignificant details such as hand gestures, sped up talk, interruptions,

intonations to the immediate data the speakers use as they co-manage their conversational

efforts. So, a quizzical response, such as that uttered by T on lines 21/ 22 below, can be seen as

significant to the development of C and T’s conversation, as is shown by how C responds in line

23. This is one example of how C and T co-managed their communications at a “turn-relevant

place”, or what CA researchers call the “next-turn proof procedure” (Ten Have, 1999).

Exemplar 1: Understanding.

12345678910

C:

T:C:T:C:T:

C:

(the final sentence of a lengthy passage)He doesn't question me more.., no he doesn't question (.8) who’s on the other line= or what I'm doing.., so it kind of makes me think.. oh? So >that's like another change then<?Yeah, {leaning back} then maybe he (1.8) you know?So, he's more ..sss, he's So, to you that says he's more secure and trusting [mm(.hhh)] {turning away} [yah] [ya, yup]which makes you think that he is more trustworthy, (.4) ((heh)) > is that what you're saying<? Yeah((tentatively))


111213141516

T:C:T:C:

Because there was this pattern.[ of ]him being kind of {head nodding} [ Yeah(1.3)]{head nodding} yeah {head nodding}questioning you, when[ [why he wouldn't trust me, and he knows (1.2) yeahhh(1.8), I think that's one of the things cause for 2, like for 2 years he more or less was doing this he was joking about me seeing someone else.....

With respect to understanding, the turn-by-turn efforts above show C & T attempting to

coordinate their use of language, showing what they used and attended to in attempting such

understandings. Line 4, shows T (the counselor) using what many counselors would term a

perception check, but note what C did with this in her Line “yeah… then, maybe…” response.

In CA, however, this normal pairing of utterance and response would be considered part of an

“adjacency pair” – a question, for example, typically begs an answer (Sacks, et al, 1974). The

measure of any utterance in dialogue is with how or whether it is ‘taken up’ by one’s

conversational partner. “Uptake” is thus an important gauge of sociality or dialogicality –

pointing to how talk is coordinated between speakers, or deficient thereof. To illustrate, the

transcription symbol ( ] ) refers to an overlap or latching of talk from one speaker to the next,

indicating their seamless attentiveness and participation in the ongoing talk. In other words

between the counselor’s line 5 perception check and line 7, including much of the unfolding

sequence of talk in this exemplar, the speakers rapidly responded (sometimes interrupting, as in

lines 7 and 11) to each other. Also noteworthy are the many ways the speakers showed each

other when they did not have, for one or the other speaker, an understanding. Note again the

counselor’s check-in in Lines 6 and 8/9 and how the client tentatively responded in Line 10, and

observe the ‘co-narration’ that had been developing in exchanges between lines 11 and 14, as if

at line 14 the client was ready to resume taking things from there.


Has an understanding been co-developed in this case? Exemplar one shows a client and

counselor coordinating their words though to Line 14’s initial interruption suggesting that full

understanding was still eluding C and T, but that the conversation could move forward from C’s

perspective. How they ‘work up’ to Line 14, in partial steps, acknowledged in C’s tentative

“yeah’s”, suggests partial understandings are being worked out. Line 14 shows a key, slowdown

at the noticeable pauses before and after C’s “yeah”. She then acknowledged her own

understanding (“I think that...”) and slightly shifts topic. Trying to understand the conversation,

as the speakers did, involves orienting to what they attended and responded to (their

conversational data) in arriving at a mutual understanding. Consistent with CA, I have attempted

to derive my understanding of how they did or didn’t understand based on what they made

evident to each other as they tried to understand.

To cross-check what was observed in the passage just noted, with client and counselor

views of whether an understanding had been accomplished between them, both were asked to

comment retrospectively. In this case, C (the client), responded to the following question, “I’m

curious what you saw in the videotaped passage that said to you yeah, I think ‘she’s with me’, or

‘she’s not’ as she tried to understand you” with:

“Yeah, I could tell or she like was thinking really hard, I think she was really thinking

about the situation. She was really trying to understand, that’s the sense that I got, even

watching her in the video right now ahm I still feel that… she was really trying hard and

she was getting me through the whole process really thoroughly…that was one of the

things like body language… it was her sense of her nodding and, you know, I could see

that her mind was really working hard at it…I felt like it’s, oh my goodness, how am I

ever going to get her to understand this. You know it’s like, okay, I got to explain


everything now and then she’s just really, like just with the body language and I could

feel it from her that she was really trying hard. That’s what I think that’s what it was”.

In asking T (the counselor) about this passage, her response was, “Do I think that we had a

shared understanding? Not exactly”. She built on this response, saying later, “I suppose I was

thinking of what we had been talking about as mistrust and thinking about if we could maybe

explore the effects of mistrust and her preference in relationship that comes to some solutions”.

One can note significant differences between the two responses. Neither reported a full

understanding had been accomplished. C (the client) pointed to the ‘hard work’ of her counselor,

based on head nods, while T (the counselor) pointed to a more conceptual level of understanding

she felt she did not quite attain. Evidence for both commentaries can be discerned from our first

exemplar. “Hard work” can be seen as evident in the frequent, rapid-fire back-and-forth between

C and T, and each nodded her head as together they built to Line 36. T shows her efforts to

conceptually propose what CA researchers (e.g., Pomerantz, 1984) call “candidate

understandings”. This is what I was referring to as partial understandings earlier on. She offers

these at Line 5 and Lines 21/22, but note how C responded to each, with a sense that T is “partly

there” but not quite (see Line 7 for an initial “yeah” followed by a more hesitant follow-up to it).

Of course, a single passage of conversation with corresponding retrospective comments

from those engaged in that passage can only point to further curiosities. What, for example,

constitutes an adequate understanding – for clients and counselors in the course of their

dialogues? Are there times when more precise or comprehensive understandings are required in

counseling? How much do counselors actually have to understand about clients’ circumstances –

even in the contexts of their problems - in order to be helpful? These are questions worth much

further theoretical and empirical examination and beyond the scope of this paper. Here, it


apparently did not matter that precise understandings informed the dialogue occurring between

the client and counselor. What mattered for the client was that it was evident how hard the

counselor was trying to understand. Perhaps understanding of this kind involves reciprocal acts

of translation based on trust and faith as some hermeneutic scholars suggest (e.g., Steiner, 1975).

In this regard speakers must rely on their translations of each other’s communications, a potential

dilemma given how much faith or trust they place in their translations because at best they can

only understand on the bases of their own interpretive histories. One can not know what is in

another’s mind, or if another’s use of a term is synonymous with their own so they rely on the

best evidence they have from their communications to decide if the understanding is adequate for

their shared purposes.

Reflection as a dialogic accomplishment.

Reflections were explained to clients and counselors as a counselor-proposed initiative

for the client to think and talk further about something the client had said. Typically, counselors

introduced reflection in later stages of their consultations when initial rapport building was not a

focal concern. Three general reasons were offered by counselors for initiating a reflection: 1) to

expand on a client utterance as possibly insufficiently articulated or meriting further elaboration,

2) to ask clients to take a value-based position on something said, and 3) to invite clients to

“deconstruct” how they came to understand something they had said. Deconstruction, a common

term for social constructionists, sees knowledge as developed in particular relational contexts

that may not serve clients well in other contexts, while at the cost of other plausible ways of

knowing (Derrida, 1976; White, 1994). Thus, inquiring about how someone “knows” something

can invite reflection on the circumstances in which that something became “known” and on

alternative ways of knowing not previously or adequately considered.


The reflection chosen for analysis here was of the first variety mentioned above.

It is from a conversation in which the client (“C”) described a trip that she intended to make with

her seriously ill adult brother, and she utters a rhetorical “what if” comment about that trip:

Exemplar 2: Reflecting

1 C: (fff) what if something did happen (.) 2 T: mm-hmm3 C: to him? 4 T: mm-hmm5 C: ((two small head nods))6 T: You mentioned earlier a kind of using ((right hand moves7 from lap to middle of chest)) the (.) you (.) you feel 8 responsible, right, for him ((right hand moves up and down 9 in circular motions, in front of chest, and then goes back 10 down to lap))11 C: yeah12 T: [if anything happened] 13 C: [nods head 4 times ] yeah 14 T: Do you,(.) tell tell me more about that, that ((right hand 15 moves from lap to chest, and back down in a circle)) you feel 16 responsible ((hand movement repeated))17 C: okay, I’mmm emotional right away (hhh)18 T: ((lifts right hand and shakes it near chest, and goes back 19 to lap)) mm-hmm20 C: Y' itsa ((repeat of line 16’s hand movement)) 21 mm-hmm the condition that he has umm(.5) 22 means that umh when he first had it 23 T: [mm-hmm]24 C: diagnosed one of the things we did was was start to grieve25 T: [un-huh]26 C: [not ha]ving um been old together (.3)27 T: [mm ]28 C: y'know because (.5) ah we thought at that point that (.6) 29 he could be dead by now [(hhh)]30 T: [mmhmm]

This passage shows how a “delicate topic” (Silverman, 2001) may be talked into a

significance that can be shared between the client and counselor. An understandable

awkwardness or tentativeness is evident in how they orient and respond to each other. For

example, the client’s initial rhetorical question (“what if something did happen…to him?”) took

five lines of talk to articulate, with pauses and verbal and nonverbal acknowledgements (mm-


hm’s and head nods) between client and counselor as they attended and responded to each

other’s communications. Communications in lines 6 through 10, and the interactions leading up

to line 17 show what the client and counselor were initiating, orienting and responding to as

relevant features of their talking together. Some gestures and paralinguistic features, transcribed

in this passage, seemed to capture the emotional intensity being co-managed by the participants

(note, for example, how the counselor puts her hand to her chest a couple of times, or how the

client nods her head 4 times in line 13) as they continued their conversation (cf., Goodwin,

1980). It is line 14 before the counselor invites a reflection incorporating the client’s Line 1

rhetorical question (“what if something did happen…to him?”) by inserting a point the client

made earlier about feeling responsible for her brother. This request for a reflection (“tell, tell me

more”) was somewhat long and tentative in the making – shown in the combination of gestures

and awkward wording of these lines. Note, in particular, the counselor’s gesture on line 16 and

the client’s utterance immediately following it on line 17. This invitation to reflect shows a key

juncture in how the conversation proceeded; it elicited emotions requiring flexible conversational

co-management by counselor and client (Edwards, 1999), a shift from ‘talk as usual’ to greater

intimacy between them (Jefferson, 1988).

In her retrospective comments, the counselor saw her line 14 reflection as: “it’s like

opening up a door… to let her emotions…or big issues come out”. For the client,

when she brought that word back…about being responsible, feeling responsible for my

brother… I was talking about grief there and I knew by the emotion… that it was tied to

something very deep… It was a good call on bringing that word back and then basically

staying out of the way.


Of course, asking about prior talk, here, in how the client and counselor regarded their

videotaped participation, is another circumstance where interviewer and interviewee co-construct

situation-specific interview responses (Ten Have, 2004). I’ve chosen to not do further

conversation analyses of these post hoc interviews though the retrospective interview with the

client also showed that talking about this passage remained a ‘delicate’ topic to co-articulate.

Interviews, like counseling, involve similar conversation co-management practices and

comparing the practices and accomplishments between them would be worth further study.

Introducing new discourses and topics?

Social constructionist counselors often focus on the conversational ‘resources’ used by

clients and counselors in counseling. By resources, I am referring to the meaning resources

(words, metaphors, stories, cultural discourses) and rhetorical resources (ways of talking or

‘performing conversation’) both bring to counseling (McNamee & Shawver, 2004). It is what

comes from these resourceful interactions that are a focus of this aspect of the study. As an

example, counselors frequently initiate new conversational topics or ways of talking about

clients’ problems and solutions. This can occur via particular questions used, given the

suppositions of those questions (Tomm, 1988), or in particular ways of talking with a particular

focus (deJong & Berg, 1998; Keeney, 1990). Initiating a new topic or discourse offers another

juncture to observe how such initiatives are co-managed (Goffman, 1967) by clients and

counselors. New discourses and topics were described as a “shift in the topic or way of talking”

by the counselor, and at least partially taken up by the client. Only those videotaped passages

endorsed by clients and counselors as meeting this definition were selected for microanalysis.

Counselors introduced new topics and discourses into their conversations with clients in

various ways, often consistent with their preferred approach to counseling. Narrative counselors


commonly “externalize” problems clients articulate (White & Epston, 1990). Theoretically, this

helps clients separate descriptions of problems from who they are to help mobilize resources to

address the linguistically externalized problem. “Depression”, (as opposed to being depressed)

for example, could be described as influencing a client’s thinking and actions in ways that could

be identified and addressed. In the third exemplar below, the counselor (“T”) has picked up on a

word used by the client earlier (“overdrive”) and uses this to introduce a new topic or discourse,

an externalization. In this case, the counselor asks the client to consider what she has been

calling a personality trait (“I do things in overdrive”) as an externalizable feature, and then asks

the client to think of how things might be should that feature not be so influential on her life.

This latter part is what solution-focused therapists call a “miracle question” (DeJong & Berg,

1998). Let us now more closely examine how this newly introduced topic or discourse plays out.

Exemplar 3 – Introducing a new discourse: Externalization with a solution focused twist.

1 C: people who just have an that easier time balancing coping 2 many people I've talked to3 T: OK (1.2) (.hhh)umh (2.0) can you imagine a time when (.4)4 uh:: (1.0) when maybe overdrive is is not a part of your () if 5 for instance uhm (1.8) uh you went to bed tonight (1.0) 6 a::nd uh while you were sleeping (.) a miracle happened7 C: OK8 T: and the miracle was (1.1) that overdrive (1.2) had been put 9 in its place (2.4)10 C: had been put in what's place?11 T: had been put in its place overdrive had been put (.) where12 C: [ohh I see]13 T: [it was]n't influencing where it was no longer 14 influencing [(1.0)] your life [(.6)] in any negative way15 C: [oh: ] [OK ] 16 T: (1.2) but (1.1) you didn't notice for a while because you 17 were sleeping18 C: OK19 T: OK (.hhh) but you wake up the next morning [(1.4) ]20 C: [mm-hmm]21 T: what would tell you (.8) as you go through the day [(1.3)]22 C: [mmm ]23 T: that (.8) a miracle's happened (1.4)24 C: I would not be obsessed with thinking [(.9]25 T: [OK ]


26 C: about it27 T: OK28 C: it would be my first indication (.) that if I woke up29 feeling calm (.6)30 T: OK so you would feel calm(1.4)and what would you be31 thinking instead (2.3) 32 C: I'd be in the moment (hhheh heh heh)33 T: OK (.5) so what would you notice in that moment (1.3)34 C: I'd probably notice >like what I smelt what I saw what I35 felt how I< hhe I'd be more aware of like senses and time 36 and uh37 T: mm-mmh (.9)38 C: uh (1.2) it's just a lot different when I'm in overdrive I39 am (.7) thinking ahead40 T: Right (.8) so you'd be in the present (1.0) so:(.7) what41 can you imagine in

For conversation analysts (e.g., Ten Have, 1999), the initiative begun on line 3 above

occurs at a “transition relevance place” meaning that such places show where a normal transition

between speakers might occur, but – more importantly - how participants manage their turns in

this place. At this juncture, introducing a new discourse could be seen as a shift from the client’s

prior talk and thus could affect the continued rapport between counselor and client. How

speakers anticipate each other’s responses, and then package their talk accordingly to manage a

development they initiate is a conversational practice referred to in CA as “recipient design”

(Pomerantz & Fehr, 1997; Sacks, et al, 1974). This may create a need for “repair” in both the

conversational and relational sense (Schegloff, 1991), something best mitigated in how they

package their talk and respond to each other in ways that are “preferred” (Pomerantz, 1984). The

new discourse above is introduced over several lines of talk in a way that could be considered

tentative (note the pauses and the client’s acknowledgement on line 7 as this initiative is

articulated). But key to regarding such an initiative as dialogically accomplished is the client’s

“uptake” (Ten Have, 1999), or lack thereof, of this initiative, and in how both client and

counselor continue to co-manage this new discourse between them should that uptake occur.


Looking more closely, by line 10, the client seems to have partly joined with this

invitation, using some of the counselor’s language in requesting clarification (“had been put in

what's place”), a feature of what Clark (1996) would describe as “common ground” in their

talking. Line 11 shows the therapist initiating a “repair” which the client takes up in the next

([“ohh I see”]), thus correcting the potential misunderstanding raised by the client’s Line 10

question (“had been put in what's place”)? In line 13 the counselor returns to her efforts to

introduce the new discourse (a miracle question). Overall, asking the miracle question required

20 lines of actual conversation (line 3 to 23) as the client and counselor worked out this new way

of talking, flagged by such developments as the client’s line 15 utterances, “Oh” and “Ok”. This

extended passage illustrates what Bavelas, et al (2000) referred to as “co-narration”, in that both

parties’ efforts could be seen as required in articulating and answer to this “miracle question”

between lines 3 and 23.

For social constructionist counselors, what matters is how their talk performs in what

clients say back. Thus, after line 23; we are shown how the client responds to this unusual way of

talking – what the proposed discourse invited or accomplished. After a short pause, the client

responds to this imaginative question with a delivery much less tentative than that used in the

counselor’s question preceding it (“I would not be obsessed with thinking”). The client offers an

indication of what would be different for her (“if I woke up feeling calm”) and the counselor

quickly acknowledges this and requests an elaboration of how things would be “instead”. How

that follow-up occurs shows how this new discourse is talked into shared significance.

“Overdrive”, is proposed as no longer a feature of the client’s life and the counselor’s invitation

to talk about what is happening “instead” elicits something new (“I’d be in the moment”); the

client has started to articulate a resourceful way of being constructionist counselors would see as


worthy of further elaboration. After providing this elaboration, the client interestingly notes how

this will help her deal with the initially externalized personality feature “overdrive”.

Retrospectively, the counselor volunteered her perspective on this passage,

I appreciate the kind of opening up that that question invites, the opening to possibilities

and … it’s satisfying because I hear about … what works for them and when.… things

are going well. …we’d gotten to a point where we could use that metaphor in a way,…the

way that she used the word in that little segment gives me more of a sense that we’re in a

place… where we’re getting closer to where we want to be…to the possibility that

something totally new is going to come out of this…. it seemed a big leap to make, ah,

and maybe there were other things before that she said that gave me that sense. But

strictly from what she said in that segment, I thought, oh well that’s sort of pushing the

meaning, but interestingly she did kind of go, yeah.

Independently, the client said,

I don’t think I ever want to hear the word overdrive again, but it was helpful to think of it

that way because … there was so much meaning attached to the word perfectionism that

the word overdrive just had a slightly different meaning to it… she respected the fact that

I didn’t want to use the word…. overdrive wasn’t so much neutral as less negative… a

different way of focusing on it so I appreciated that shift because I’d been given the word

perfectionism and kind of just labeled myself as that. So this was something that maybe

we created ourselves and so it was more mine and if I wanted to change it, it was a little

easier… to think of things in terms of overdrive.


While the counselor above was concerned with “pushing the meaning”, and the client

indicated she didn’t like the word “overdrive”, shifting to talking about “overdrive” from her

former self-description (“perfectionism”) made the possibility for considering change easier.

Discussion

The fundamental ‘looseness’ of natural language is crucial to the creative functions of

internalized and outward speech. A ‘closed’ syntax, a formally exhaustible semantics,

would be a closed world.

(Steiner, 1975, p.228)

Centuries ago, the humanist-philosopher Vico (1999/1744) suggested humans look

closely at the languages they used in constructing the institutional realities by which they lived.

Counseling is one such institution with practices that are primarily conversational thus making a

close look at the languages used within it and realities experienced worthy of study. While some

scholars in the field have long championed this rhetorical perspective (e.g., Frank, 1987), the

dominant view of conversation in counseling remains closer to a conduit metaphor wherein

information is seen as exchanged (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). With a rise in social constructionist

approaches to counseling landscape has come a greater focus on the rhetorical capacity of

therapeutic dialogue to construct and deconstruct clients’ meanings and actions. How this occurs,

what might derive from such dialogues, and how clients and counselors experience those

dialogues are curiosities that have been examined in an exploratory way by this study.

One impetus for this study came from key practitioner-authors of the social

constructionist approaches to counseling (e.g., Madsen, 1999) who claim that clients experience

these approaches as collaborative and respectful. Another relates to Potter’s (1996) quote at the

start of this paper: what gets constructed in the social constructionist approaches to counseling


should be better understood. Both inspirations led me to micro-analyze actual passages of social

constructionist counseling and to hear about them from the clients and counselors involved.

By combining the methods of conversation analysis and comprehensive process analysis,

my curiosity was rewarded in preliminary ways. In the CA literature one finds more exhaustive

analyses, such as Douglas Maynard’s (2003) career endeavour in cataloguing how professional

and lay speakers “do” giving and receiving good and bad news. Thus, there may be merit, for

example, in gaining better understandings, via conversation analysis, of how certain

interventions are dialogically transacted or accomplished between clients and counselors. Since

conversation and discourse analyses share theoretical premises with social constructionist

counseling, evaluating the use of such interventions for what they accomplish could help in the

evidence-based era that now shapes counseling practice (Division 12, 1995). A caution is in

order here, however, because these research methods do not aim for quantitative or reductionist

outcomes, nor are constructionist interventions reducible to reliably administered protocols as is

commonly desired for psychotherapy process and outcome research (Dobson & Craig, 1998).

A more beneficial use of such research methods may arise from the assistance they give

to examining the micro-pragmatics of counseling practice. In the counselor training literature

these pragmatics are often boiled down to discrete conversational skills counselors are meant to

use (e.g., Cormier & Nurius, 2003; Egan, 1998), without focusing on dialogic uptake (or lack

thereof) by clients as shown in a study like this. Counselors in training or supervision can make

beneficial use of such micro-analyses of their own conversational practices and how clients

respond to them (Gale, Dotson, Lindsey & Negireddy, 1993; Strong, 2003). While such analyses

are time consuming and labour intensive, especially when twinned with follow-up interviews

with clients, these analyses could teach counselor trainees and supervisees much about how they


and clients use conversation, and how their practice is experienced by clients. In particular,

counselor trainees and supervisees could gain a better sense of their participation in counseling’s

“hermeneutic circle” (Anderson, 1997); in how their conversational practices are oriented to and

possibly taken up by clients. Such efforts to refine counselor sensitivities to how their talk

‘performs’ may assist those interested in teaching and supervising social constructionist

approaches to counseling.

The research reported here emphasizes what a growing number of primarily sociological

studies of counseling discourse show; that counselor intentions, and the conversational means by

which counselors attempt to realize them in dialogues with clients, are very much “worked out”

in the back and forth of the actual talk of counseling (e.g., Peräkyla, 1993; Vehviläinen, 2003).

There is conversational work involved not just in delivering particular interventions (i.e., in

terms of linguistic ‘packaging’) but that the delivery is anything but a one way communication

from an active speaker to a receptive listener. This extends to even the diagnostic language used

in counseling (Antaki, 2001). Why this should matter to practicing counselors owes much to how

clients’ responses are regarded by counselors. CA shows communications occurring in practical

interpretations and negotiations occurring between speakers – interpretations and negotiations its

fine-grained analyses make evident. The kinds of taken-for-granted micro-details examined in

CA highlight a feature of interpersonal communication for which many use fuzzy relationally

descriptive words like “chemistry” or “vibes” where actual conversational practices are used.

Good conversational practice in counseling involves more conversational work than is often

portrayed in the counseling textbooks (Cormier & Nurius, 2003; Egan, 1998) where

‘understanding’, for example, relates to discrete prescribed utterances in response to clients. The

same would apply to any intervention a counselor might use since its “delivery” involves far


more than a precision articulation to which clients would be expected to respond. To return to a

social constructionist perspective, constructing forward movement in counseling dialogue is an

interpretive endeavour in collaborative meaning-making that has relational consequences. These

interpretations and new meanings are worked out in the immediacies of talking, and not

unilaterally in the well-versed directives of the counselor to the deferential and receptive client.

The passages of talk shown here reflect how understandings, reflections and new discourses were

worked out between client and counselor. As for the retrospective analyses, they offer a glimmer

of understanding on what it was like to participate in these shared conversational endeavours.

Since CA is an empirical research method it may be valuable in widening the “evidence

base” for psychological practice (Division 12 Task Force, 1996). The most common approach to

examining the efficacy of particular interventions in psychological practice is to do reductive

quantitative analyses using outcome measures for reliably administered interventions. Such

research hinges on the uniformity of the intervention and the generalizability of its use across

populations – typically as a result of randomized clinical trials. This wholesale importation of the

medical model and its research methods has been a source of some controversy recently (e.g.,

Wampold, 2001) as its methods and conclusions offer little insight into the actual practice of

counseling and what is accomplished within the microdynamics of its dialogues. CA, conversely,

examines how people make sense of each other as they co-manage developments in their

dialogues, and it offer a means to examine how speakers accomplish particular outcomes through

their use of talk (Ten Have, 1999). One can examine how a particular intervention was used and

what – conversationally – takes place in and results from the course of its use in the immediacies

of dialogue. As such, CA may offer a useful approach to studying the theoretically compatible

social constructionist approaches to counseling for which conversation is depicted as a means of


co-constructing outcomes between client and counselor. So, for example, narrative counselors

(White & Epston, 1990) use particular externalization questions to help clients separate

descriptions of problems from ways of identifying themselves as individuals. The use of such

questions, the responses they elicit, and the potential helpfulness of such questions could be

better understood when examined by studies incorporating conversation analyses.

A further way of considering the kinds of conversational accomplishments I have been

describing as evidence is to consider these similar to reported outcomes from case studies. CA

offers evidence of shifts in conversational practice relevant to client goals. In this respect, one

can examine particular counseling dialogues, for how (or whether) client selected outcomes were

accomplished. The addition of client voices about these accomplishments as was done here using

CPA can be instructive to counselors who are learning about particular interventions and how

these are co-developed and experienced. Ironically, the evidence many counselors turn to, to

inspire and inform their practice come from less detailed accounts of therapist interventions in

textbooks. This is especially the case when interventions, such as those co-developed in

nonlinear or non-standardized ways in the social constructionist approaches to counseling, are

the focus of scrutiny. For some psychotherapy research critics (e.g., Wampold, 2001) the

methods and outcomes informing evidence-based practice have been too narrow and ‘thin’ in

terms of reporting on interventions. Needed are thicker accounts of what accounts for change.

CA studies of interventions can assist in not only identifying potentially significant shifts in

counseling dialogue, but can sensitize counselors to the infinitely varied ways in which

interventions can be co-developed with clients. In an era where funding is increasingly tied to the

use of “empirically supported interventions” (Dobson & Craig, 1998), CA has a potential


contribution to make as one means to scrutinize the conversational interventions particular to the

social constructionist approaches to counseling.

In closing, this exploratory study takes seriously the claim central to McNamee and

Gergen’s (1992) book entitled “Therapy as social construction”; namely, that it is in social and

cultural interaction that people construct and uphold particular understandings and ways of being

in the world. Counseling can be seen as “construction zone”, par excellence, in this regard, and

there is much to be learned about how the conversational practices of counselors and clients – in

dialogic interaction - can make differences in clients’ lives there.


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Appendix 1

Table 1 Transcription notation

Symbol Indicates

(.) A pause which is noticeable but too short to measure.(.5) A pause timed in tenths of a second.= There is no discernible pause between the end of a speaker’s utterance and

the start of the next utterance: One or more colons indicate an extension of the preceding vowel sound.

Underlin e

Underlining indicates words that were uttered with added emphasis.

CAPITAL Words in capitals are uttered louder than surrounding talk.(.hhh) Exhalation of breath; number of h’s indicate length.(hhh) Inhalation of breath; number of h’s indicates length.( ) Indicates a back-channel comment or sound from previous speaker that does

not interrupt the present turn.[ Overlap of talk.(( )) Double parenthesis indicate clarificatory information, e.g. ((laughter)).? Indicates rising inflection.! Indicates animated tone.. Indicates a stopping fall in tone.** Talk between * * is quieter than surrounding talk.> < Talk between > < is spoken more quickly than surrounding talk.{ } Non-verbals, choreographic elements.Source: Kogan, (1998)

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Accomplishments in Social Constructionist Counseling: Micro-analytic and Retrospective Analyses