Viewing agency talk from two different methodological

perspectivesLeena Ehrling,

PhDFinnish Association for Mental Health,

Psychotherapy Clinic

QRMH, Nottingham, 26 August 2010

This presentation

• Views the possibilities that parallel use of two methods (Dialogical sequence analysis, DSA and Conversation analysis, CA) offer for the study of psychotherapy talk

• Both methods focus on the interplay between client utterances and therapist’s responses, but from different frame of references:

-DSA -thematic content of experiences-CA -the way emotions and experiences are

displayed, interpreted and mutually understood

Background

• Interest in the context of psychotherapy research is in understanding and describing the process of therapeutic change

• Language-based methods enlighten the ”what” and ”how” questions of the process

• In order to receive as comprehensive a view as possible of therapy discourse the same data is analyzed with two different methologies

Dialogical Sequence Analysis• Evolved in the context of supervising

psychotherapy (Leiman 1994)

• A micro-analytic method to examine the dialogical organizations of client and therapist utterances in therapeutic discourse:

- the dialogical positions that the client takes > >nature and content of problematic experiences

• Is not a standardized procedure but rather a set of theoretical concepts that articulate relational configurations

• Theoretical background in (Bakhtinian) semiotics

Conversation analysis (CA)

• Origin in ethnomethodology • Views talk as social action • Examines talk as conjoint activity and describes

how shared understanding is achieved (how utterances relate to one another)

• The crucial part of the research procedure is the making of the collection of the recurrent interactional phenomena > reveals the nature and variation of the phenomena in question

Data

• Couple’s therapy session (first encounter)• Here focus is on the female client’s issues

-about 30 years old -diagnosed with obsessive-

compulsive disorder-on a sick-leave-lives together with her boyfriend

since a couple of years

DSA: data for Kerttu’s central theme

”…our relationship is stuck because of my illness…””…it’s a two-sided thing because I guess I should

feel better so that my illness would not be hindering our relationship but …”

”…the illness means that I’m incapable of normal – live the way or do things I would like to so it (the illness) makes my life rather distressed (3) it’s better not to think about it, it’s easier to avoid thinking too much about what my days are like because thinking about it ends up in a feeling that there’s no sense in the life of mine…”

Kerttu’s central self-state

”The disable and helpless”

Denying Controlling

Denied Guilty,

insignificant helpless

Negotiating agency

T: erm where do you go to, (for therapy)

K: down town.

T: yeah, how do you get there,

K: I take the train and two trams.

T: yeah and it works out just fine.

K: ehm mmm (1.5) well it has worked out ok lately, this is the first time ever that I’ve been able to go there every time

before I felt worse and didn’t go.

Summing up

Advantages of parallel reading:DSA yields a summary of problematic

experiences, CA elucidates how these are made sense of in actual therapy discourse

Challenges:Demands careful attention to their differing

logic of analying data and differing theoretical concepts