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Relationships in Organized Helping: Analyzing interaction in psychotherapy, medical encounters, coaching and in social media
Edited by Claudio Scarvaglieri, Eva-Maria Graf and Thomas Spranz-Fogasy
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 331] 2022
► pp. 151–170

The role of semi-responsive answers for relationship building in coaching

| ZHAW School of Applied Linguistics

This paper discusses the role of semi-responsive answers of clients for relationship building in coaching. Coaching is a process-oriented type of counseling in which a coach and a coachee collaboratively work on solving a particular worklife or daily life related concern of the coachee. The paper aims at identifying and analyzing semi-responsive answers of coachees (second pair part) as reactions to initiating turns of coaches (first pair part). It is hypothesized that semi-responsive answers are of particular relevance for any coaching process as they reveal ambivalences, (inner) conflicts, uncertainties and/or opposition on the client’s side which ought to be noticed and appropriately addressed by the coach. A conversation analysis manual was developed in order to systematically identify and analyze the linguistic characteristics of semi-responsiveness in coachee’s answers. First, theoretical and methodological aspects regarding a conversation analysis manual to study structures of social interaction are discussed. Second, a code-system to identify semi-responsive answers is demonstrated. Finally, based on the transcribed data, semi-responsive answers are analyzed with respect to how they are addressed by the coaches in third position. The data consists of 21 face-to-face coaching sessions (64 hours) in Swiss and Standard German. The analysis demonstrates that semi-responsive answers are both a valuable source of information and a challenge as they require the coach to maintain a balance between facilitating the process and maintaining a good relationship with the client.

Keywords: semi-responsiveness, coaching relationship, conversation analysis, coding manual
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theory
    • 2.1Helping conversation
    • 2.2Conversation analysis and responsiveness
    • 2.3Semi-responsive answers in coaching
    • 2.4Third position actions and the coach-client-relationship
    • 2.5Research question
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1CA-grounded manual
    • 3.2Sample
    • 3.3Developing categories (Codes)
    • 3.4Applying the codes
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 7 September 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.331.07win
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