Reflective processing is a joint social action that develops in interaction. Using conversation analysis and discursive psychology, this article focuses on self-reflective turns of talk in group counselling for adults at risk of Type 2 diabetes. We show how reflective processing unfolds in patterns of interaction, wherein group members take an observing, evaluating or interpreting position towards their own actions and experiences. Self-reflective talk is neither exclusively dependent on counsellors' actions nor limited to the niches the counselling programme structure offers. Self-reflective talk is one method of generating joint reflective processing. Such talk makes a topic available for discussion by connecting details of counselling with individuals' experiences and enabling sharing. Self-reflective talk thus serves as a way for group members to participate in constructing a lifestyle problem, to invite or provide sharing of experiences and to display their orientation to the institutional task at hand. KeywordsCognition, conversation analysis, counselling, discursive psychology, ethnomethodology, group counselling, group discussion, group interaction, health behaviour change, health counselling, interaction process, reflection, self-reflection iii Autobiographical note Aija Logren (M.Soc.Sc) is a social psychologist and doctoral student at the University of Tampere.Her research focuses on group interaction in counselling situations and on socially shared cognition.Johanna Ruusuvuori (Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Tampere) has vast experience in analysing interaction in various contexts of health care. She has published widely on practices equivalent or close to counselling, empathy and participation in health care consultations, and qualitative methods.Jaana Laitinen (Adjunct Professor in Nutrition and in Public Health, Director) specializes in intervention studies aiming to promote healthy lifestyles and work ability. Additionally, she has studied the development of unhealthy behaviours in an epidemiological prospective study of Northern Finland 1966 and 1986 cohort studies.

Drawing on conversation analysis, this study examines how peers respond to each other’s self-disclosures in group counseling interaction. Responses that display sharing and recognition of the experience normalize the experience and build an alliance among group members. This way, responses bring about social support. In addition, responses can offer a different perspective on the views presented in self-disclosures. The responses endorse or challenge the claims that are made and the stance taken in the initial self-disclosure, and link the personal, individual experience to general axioms. The implicit ways of responding to a self-disclosure allow a person to participate in a conversation about intimate and potentially delicate topics without revealing private details. Through self-disclosures and responses to them, participants talk into being the ideals of health counseling and healthy lifestyle: What kind of activities are considered eligible and attainable. The relation of these practices to the institutional goal is intricate. It builds on, first, the stance taken in the self-disclosure toward the institutional goal and the sociocultural values pertaining to it, and second, the responses’ alignment with that stance and what kind of values and ideals it further evokes.

Observing the occurrence of group members' questions helps group leaders to adjust their own actions accordingly and thus facilitate or guide group participation. Comparison of the type and frequency of members' questions is a way to detect different trajectories for delivering group interventions and can thus be used to develop methods for process evaluation of interventions.

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In this article, we examine comparative time-framed experience telling: episodes of interaction in health promotion group discussions in which one of the participants tells their experience and, in response, another participant tells their own experiences from separate moments or periods of their life and compares them. In so doing, group members reinforce and encourage the previous speaker’s positive stance or challenge the negative stance toward contextually relevant objects: behavior change and suggested solutions. This practice allows group members to demonstrate their independent access to experiences that are similar to those of the other, present evidence of similarities and differences between the experiences, and show their epistemic independence regarding their claims. By recontextualizing the experience of the other in this way, it becomes possible for the group members to interpret and even oppose it while maintaining a level of understanding of the differences between the experiences in question and respecting them.