This study conceptualizes and investigates career-relevant parent-child conversations and other actions over time as a family project. Dyads composed of a parent and an adolescent from 20 families participated in a videotaped career-related conversation to determine a family career-development project that was subsequently monitored for a 6-month period and followed up with a 2nd videotaped conversation. On the basis of a systematic qualitative analysis, several dimensions were identified as facilitating the family career-development project, including joint goals, communication, goals-steps congruence, and individuation. These family career-development projects were organized as part of broader relationship, identity, parenting, and cultural projects that also played a decisive role in the success of the family career-development projects themselves.

The qualitative action-project method is described as an appropriate and heuristic qualitative research method for use in counseling psychology. Action theory, which addresses human intentional, goaldirected action, project, and career, provides the conceptual framework for the method. Data gathering and analysis involve multiple procedures to access information from 3 perspectives: manifest behavior, internal processes, and social meaning. The method has a number of advantages, including its conceptualization, which is close to human experience; its systematic data gathering and analysis procedures; its usefulness in describing processes of interest to counseling psychologists; and its uniqueness among qualitative research methods.

This study was conducted to support the publication of guidelines for media reporting on suicide. First, quantitative and qualitative aspects of suicide reporting in Swiss print media were surveyed over a time span of 8 months. The results were presented at a national press conference, and written guidelines for suicide reporting were sent out to all newspaper editors. The results of the survey and the guidelines were discussed in a personal meeting with the Editor-in-Chief of the main tabloid. After the publication of the guidelines a second, identical survey was conducted. The main variables regarding frequency, form, and content of the newspaper reports before and after the press conference were compared. The number of articles, on the one hand, increased over the 3 years between the first and second survey, but the quality of reporting clearly improved on the other. The personal contact with the editor of the tabloid was probably the most effective means of intervention.

No abstract

The findings of an international workshop on improving clinical interactions between mental health workers and suicidal patients are reported. Expert clinician-researchers identified common contemporary problems in interviews of suicide attempters. Various videotaped interviews of suicide attempters were critically discussed in relation to expert experience and the existing literature in this area. The working group agreed that current mental health practice often does not take into account the subjective experience of patients attempting suicide, and that contemporary clinical assessments of suicidal behavior are more clinician-centered than patient-centered. The group concluded that clinicians should strive for a shared understanding of the patient's suicidality; and that interviewers should be more aware of the suicidal patient's inner experience of mental pain and loss of self-respect. Collaborative and narrative approaches to the suicidal patient are more promising, enhancing the clinician's ability to empathize and help the patient begin to reestablish a sense of mastery, thereby strengthening the clinical alliance.

Human social systems, and groups in partlcular, are conceived as units which, as a whole, actively strive towards the achievement of external and internal goals. This 'group action' consists of simultaneous integrated processes on various individual and social levels. Our theory comprises four groups of constructs, which refer to task structure, group structure, information processing and execution. In an ongoing group action, the task structure is projected on the group structure; according to the resulting pattern, the group processes its action related information and executes the act. The latter two processes proceed on two levels, on an individual and on a group level. There are cognition, emotion and volition on the individual, and communicahon on the group level of information processing; execution proceeds in individual action and in cooperation. A specific part of the theory concerns analogies between individual cognition and intragroup communication. AIMS AND DEPARTUREIn this paper we aim to develop the contours of a theory of group action which corresponds to our present knowledge of the directed behaviour of self-active systems, and particularly of human goal-directed action. We conceive the group as a system composed of active sub-systems, sub-groups or individual actors; group action therefore constitutes at least a two-level process. This viewpoint makes a proper analysis of group action possible, which, we believe, will in turn lead to an improved understanding of the structure and function of groups, will give a more 'We are grateful to the students of our seminars on group action and mass psychology for their discussions and criticism. meaningful order to other concepts and findings and thus may lead group psychology out of its present stagnation. Our theory should also particularly help to analyse leadership as a specific process of group action; and, although it has been primarily designed for the description and explanation of small group processes, it should further a better understanding of the action of organizations and of mass action.Why have we engaged in this ambitious enterprise? Beyond the immediate instigation, a symposium about problems of leadership2, we were impressed by the finding that current small group theory hardly analyses behaviour on the group level. As textbooks, manuals and review articles document, it mainly deals with the behaviour, cognitions and feelings, be they interactive or not, of individuals in groups or with aspects of group structure, group norms and their impact on individuals. There is one line of research (discussed by Moscovici and Paicheler 1973) which is relevant to our problem: the study of group efficiency. Let us shortly outline those ideas mainly developed in French social psychology which are of major interest for us. The first of these is the introduction of two factors beyond the capability of the individual member, namely the structure of the group and the the structure of the task as important co-producers of group efficiency (e.g. Ro...

The role of emotion in the construction of career has not always been clear despite its importance in people's lives and in counseling. Recent conceptualizations suggest that emotion is a complex relational process that is socially constructed. This study illustrates the role of emotion in the construction of career from an action theory perspective. Two parent-adolescent conversations about career from a group of 14 conversations are analysed in detail to demonstrate the ways in which emotions serve to energise action and career and lend context and meaning to the process of constructing career in the family setting.

No abstract