Requesting Examples in Psychodiagnostic Interviews

Abstract

As part of a larger research project on understanding change in helping professions, this paper investigates into therapists’ requesting examples and their interactional and sequential contri-bution to clients’ change. Requesting examples by therapists in psychodiagnostic interviews explicitly or implicitly criticize the patient’s prior turn as insufficient, i.e. as unclear, vague, or as too general. Such a request opens a retro-sequence (Schegloff 2007) and in the following provides for a description that both helps clarify the semantic vagueness and evinces psychic or relational aspects of the topic at hand. While the patient’s insufficient presentation is initi-ated by a prior request of the therapist, the patient’s example presentation is regularly fol-lowed by the therapist’s summarizing comments or by further requests focusing on the pa-tient’s problem. Requesting examples thus are a particular case of requests that follow ‘ex-pandable responses’ as described by Muntigl & Zabala (2008); they follow the same sequential organization, yet, given that they make examples conditionally relevant, they are more specif-ic. With the help of this sequential organization both participants co-construct elements of common knowledge. Such an ‘interplay of understanding’ (Voutilainen & Peräkylä 2014) al-lows the therapist to pursue the overall aim of therapy, i.e. to increase the patients’ awareness of their distorted perceptions, and thus to pave the way for change. The data comprises of 16 videotaped first interviews following the manual of the Operationalized Psychodynamic Di-agnostics (OPD Task Force 2009). It was collected in cooperation with the Clinic for General Internal Medicine and Psychosomatic at the University Clinic of Heidelberg.