‘What are you taking away with you?’ Closing radio counselling encounters by reviewing progress

Abstract

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.

Applied conversation analysis for counselling and psychotherapy researchers

“…For example, we attended to the role of children in family therapy and identified ways in which children passively or actively resisted participation (O'Reilly & Parker, ). By drawing attention to the subtleties of the interaction, therapists can become more aware of children's attention during a session. In CA work on radio counselling, Thell and Peräkylä () attended to how such encounters were closed down, while doing therapeutic work in the public sphere. They showed that callers were asked to single out useful aspects of the encounter and noted that, by requiring the formulation of conclusions by the caller, there was a recognition of their entitlement to judge the outcomes, but also checked and reviewed the caller's understanding of the problem. In a study of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Antaki, Leudar, and Barnes () demonstrated that there can be resistance by a client with the therapist's formulation of the problem, and this disaffiliation asserts a position of the client's felt experience.…”

“…There • In CA work on radio counselling, Thell and Peräkylä (2018) attended to how such encounters were closed down, while doing therapeutic work in the public sphere. They showed that callers were asked to single out useful aspects of the encounter and noted that, by requiring the formulation of conclusions by the caller, there was a recognition of their entitlement to judge the outcomes, but also checked and reviewed the caller's understanding of the problem.…”