Recent QueSCo Publications

Latest publications

The duration of the project “Questioning Sequences in Coaching” is slowly coming to an end. However, there is good news regarding the publication of initial results and other contributions to (linguistic and psychological) coaching process research.

On the one hand, the QueSCo team (in various constellations) has published three articles as part of the topical collection “Innovative Studies in Organized Helping: Transforming Relations, Emotions and Referents through Sequentially Structured Practices” in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. The topical collection, edited by Claudio Scarvaglieri, Peter Muntigl and Eva-Maria Graf, focuses on change in helping interactions at different levels, i.e. at the level of contents, emotions and working alliance. Within this context, the article by Dionne et al. (2024) deals with resistance to wh-questions within question sequences in coaching. Apart from resistance phenomena that have already been described in other helping interactions, the client strategy called “refocusing” could be identified. Using this strategy, clients can (productively) steer the conversation into a different direction. The article by Moos & Spranz-Fogasy (in press) also deals with the reactions to coaches’ questions. They investigated how questions can elicit clients’ self-reflection. Finally, the article by Jautz et al. (2023) deals with the topic of agenda setting in coaching. Various social actions by coaches were identified that fulfill an agenda-setting function, such as requisting or providing agenda information, but also proposals or offers.

On the other hand, Lara Calasso and Melanie Fleischhacker have published articles as part of their cumulative PhD projects. Melanie Fleischhacker, together with Eva-Maria Graf, published two methodological-theoretical texts, which are fundamental for Linguistic Coaching Process Research (LCPR) and thus address a broad readership. In a scoping review, all linguistic contributions to coaching process research were systematically collected, documented, and analyzed for the very first time. The analysis presents the most important results and identifies advantages and disadvantages as well as research gaps and desiderata of a linguistic approach to the coaching process. In a second methodological-theoretical article, Conversation Analysis is presented as a systematic, transparent, and reliable method for analyzing coach-client interactions. An exemplary analysis shows its application to question sequences. Lara Calasso also published the first article of her psychological dissertation. She conducted a systematic review of previous contributions on different coaching behaviors to find out more about what coaches actually do when they coach.

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