Visualization and Punctuation of Psychological Counseling by Qualitative and Quantitative Methods

Abstract

Improving interviewers’ skills is especially critical in the field of clinical psychology for the psychological support of clients. Although post-interview reflections are important for improving skills, most are conducted qualitatively. To prove the concept of visualization and punctuation of psychological counseling through the quantitative method in addition to the conventional qualitative method, this study attempted to combine a semi-quantitative method—Motivational Interviewing Skill Code (MISC)—and quantitative methods—natural language processing and Motion Energy Analysis (MEA)—with qualitative evaluations. We visualized the data of a case and examined whether this contributed to reflections of psychological interviews. The results of the analyses were almost consistent at the turning point of the interview and showed agreement between the results of MISC and MEA. The approaches were found to be complementary despite the differences in the type of information (verbal or nonverbal) and evaluation methods utilized. These outcomes suggest that visualization and punctuation of communication using both quantitative and qualitative methods may be useful for reflections of interview and improving interviewing skills. Employing quantitative methods will increase the reproducibility of evaluation results and provide further insight than that gained by conventional methods. These approaches can be applied for improving the skills of interviewers (e.g., post-interview reflecting) and enhancing diverse communication-related studies and practices.