Soliciting children’s views on other-perspectives in child mental health assessments

Abstract

Child mental health assessments are complex and involve the analysis of data from multiple sources to inform treatment decisions. Question sequences are central to mental health assessments; however, little research has examined the functions of questions in child mental health interactions, particularly questions that aim to elicit information from children that might be used to inform diagnosis and treatment. In this study, we utilize a large corpus of video-recorded child mental health assessments to examine the use and function of a particular kind of wh-question—circular questions—that is, questions that seek clients’ views on other family members’ feelings, actions, and thoughts. Using conversation analysis, we identified three “broad” functions of circular questions in child mental health assessment. Our findings provide clinicians with clinically relevant examples for using circular questions to more fully involve children in the assessment process and acquire valuable information for diagnosis.

Promoting the Value of Discursive Psychology for the Field of Human Resource Development: A Pedagogical Guide for Qualitative Researchers

“…There are no hard and fast rules about the size of the dataset, but rather a researcher must consider what they hope to make sense of and how the size of the dataset can support them in this process. In addition, the kind of data collected might be conversational (e.g., Lester et al, in press), text-based (Lester & Paulus, 2011), and/or include images (McCullough & Lester, 2021).…”

“…We provide another example below taken from Lester et al (in press) from the same data corpus. Here the child fails to provide a reason why his parents have bought him to the appointment claiming not to know why they have done so.…”

Innovative studies in organized helping: Transforming relations, emotions and referents through sequentially structured practices

“…Complying with these preferences is considered to be affiliative . CA-based studies have begun to identify some important functions of questioning in health assessment and therapeutic interactions, which include the following: attributing the client with positive attributes or so-called optimistic questions ; hypothetical questions to test patients' views or commitments regarding treatment (Speer, 2012); reflexive questions that "elicit, clarify, and unpack clients" reasoning-their explanations of and reflections on their own experience" (Gaete et al, 2018, p. 125) and circular questioning to elicit a client's perspective about a co-present other's beliefs or feelings Rossen et al, 2020;Lester et al, 2022).…”

Strategic use of observer-perspective questions in couples therapy

“…Complying with these preferences is considered to be affiliative (Stivers et al, 2011 ). CA-based studies have begun to identify some important functions of questioning in health assessment and therapeutic interactions, which include the following: attributing the client with positive attributes or so-called optimistic questions (MacMartin, 2008 ); hypothetical questions to test patients' views or commitments regarding treatment (Speer, 2012 ); reflexive questions that “ elicit, clarify, and unpack clients” reasoning—their explanations of and reflections on their own experience ” (Gaete et al, 2018 , p. 125) and circular questioning to elicit a client's perspective about a co-present other's beliefs or feelings (Peräkylä, 1995 ; Rossen et al, 2020 ; Lester et al, 2022 ).…”