This study explicates in interactional detail the interpretative use of cultural common-sense knowledge about the life course in the context of the specific institutional tasks of radio counselling.
Psychological radio counselling is a relatively recent development in psychological practice, where professionals provide psychological help via mass media communication. In the media context, a professional and a help-seeker face a number of communicative challenges, one of which is to close the encounter meaningfully with regard to its counselling and radio tasks. This study explicates how radio counselling encounters can be rounded off by summarising and reviewing the progress achieved in understanding the caller’s problem. At the end of the encounters, the radio psychologist invited callers to look back at the conversation and to formulate possible gains from it. On one hand, the radio psychologist encouraged callers’ reflection and acknowledged the callers’ entitlement to pass judgement on the outcomes of the encounter. On the other hand, the radio psychologist checked and subsequently reviewed the caller’s understanding of his or her problem and its solutions. We discuss how the practice was used to round off the encounters in a distinct way with an orientation to their counselling and radio objectives.
This paper examines how images of unfortunate childhoods are invoked to make sense of psychological problems in adulthood. I use conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis to study a Swedish radio program in which a psychotherapist talks to people about their personal troubles. The findings suggest that, on one hand, the image of an unfortunate childhood was used as an explanatory framework for individuals' problematic experiences. On the other hand, the childhood‐grounded reasoning, applied to individual cases, illustrated the explanatory framework and reaffirmed it as a commonsense way of reasoning about personal troubles.
In anonymous online text-based counselling provided by social services, counsellors face specific communicative and professional challenges. Among other things, they need to ensure that they have understood the chat users correctly in order to provide relevant information and advice. The paper studies how counsellors check their understanding of users’ situations by using formulations, namely, summarising and rephrasing users’ initial problem descriptions. The data consists of chat logs from 56 web-based counselling sessions provided by social services in Sweden. Conversational analysis is used to examine the functions of chat counsellors’ formulations. Analyses show that counsellors reformulate users’ initial requests to establish a joint understanding of the users’ situations and help requested. Three distinct functions of the initial formulations are identified: recasting requests in the institutional terms of social services, clarifying ambiguity in the user’s initial posts and affiliating with the user.
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