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As part of a larger research paradigm on understanding client change in the helping professions from an interprofessional perspective, this paper applies a conversation analytic approach to investigate therapists’ requesting examples (REs) and their interactional and sequential contribution to clients’ change during the diagnostic evaluation process. The analyzed data comprises 15 videotaped intake interviews that followed the system of Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnosis. Therapists’ requesting examples in psychodiagnostic interviews explicitly or implicitly criticize the patient’s prior turn as insufficient. They also open a retro-sequence and in the following turns provide for a description that helps clarify meaning and evince psychic or relational aspects of the topic at hand. While the therapist’s prior request initiates the patient’s insufficient presentation, the patient’s example presentation is regularly followed by the therapist’s summarizing comments or by further requests. Requesting examples thus are a particular case of requests that follow expandable responses regarding the sequential organization; yet, given that they make examples conditionally relevant, they are more specific. With the help of this sequential organization, participants co-construct common knowledge which allows the therapist to pursue the overall aim of therapy, which is to increase the patients’ awareness of their distorted perceptions, and thus to pave the way for change.
The goal of the current contribution is to discuss the specific change potential of requesting examples in the helping formats ‘psychotherapy’ and coaching’. Requesting examples are defined as retrospective requests from the therapist/coach to the patient/client to elaborate the latter’s directly preceding utterance via an exemplary concretization. To appropriately reflect upon past events and upon personal experiences is often considered a key for change given that such reflections allows patients/clients to develop alternative and new perspectives on their lives, their relationships, their selves etc. To work with examples or to present concrete experiences thus functions as a central change practice both in psychotherapy and in coaching. While this discursive practice entails an inherent change potential, we still have to empirically unfold the sequential, thematic and action theoretical design of requesting examples as well as their interaction-type specific change function(s). This has already been done in the context of therapy. We now widen the focus and contrast these findings with analyses of requesting examples in executive coaching. Thereby this contribution does not only provide in-depth insight into the change potential of requesting examples, but also adds to further differentiate therapy and coaching as regards their discursive and interactive layout.