Prompting reflection and learning in career construction counseling

Adopting the overall framework provided for an international inquiry into career counseling interventions, this article reports on a qualitative study into the efficacy of a relatively new approach to practice in England. Using career construction interviews as the counseling intervention, research involving two adult participants was undertaken. Interpersonal process recall (IPR) was used to explicate the perceptions and understandings of both the participants and the counselor in the process. Outcome analysis framed the approach used to making sense of the data collected. Two contrasting responses were immediately evident from participants in the counseling intervention: one positive and one negative. The use of the IPR process enabled an understanding of the value of a structured process of reflection.     

Narrative Approaches to Organizational Development: A Case Study of Implementation of Collaborative Helping

Across North America, community agencies and state/provincial jurisdictions are embracing family‐centered approaches to service delivery that are grounded in strength‐based, culturally responsive, accountable partnerships with families. This article details a collaborative consultation process to initiate and sustain organizational change toward this effort. It draws on innovative ideas from narrative theory, organizational development, and implementation science to highlight a three component approach. This approach includes the use of appreciative inquiry focus groups to elicit existing best practices, the provision of clinical training, and ongoing coaching with practice leaders to build on those better moments and develop concrete practice frameworks, and leadership coaching and organizational consultation to develop organizational structures that institutionalize family‐centered practice. While the article uses a principle‐based practice framework, Collaborative Helping, to illustrate this process, the approach is applicable with a variety of clinical frameworks grounded in family‐centered values and principles.     

Constructing We‐ness: A Communal Coping Intervention for Couples Facing Chronic Illness

Communal coping occurs when relationship partners view a stressful health problem as “ours,” rather than yours or mine, and take collaborative action to deal with it. Although research employing linguistic (we‐talk) and other measures of communal coping demonstrates relevance to a variety of chronic illnesses, the literature offers little about how clinicians can actively promote we‐ness and teamwork to help patients and their partners achieve the health benefits this appears to confer. This paper highlights clinical and supporting scientific features of a narrative intervention designed to foster communal coping by couples in which one partner has a chronic illness. The illustrative illness is diabetes, but with modification the protocol is suitable for other chronic conditions as well. Grounded in systemic and narrative models of problem maintenance and change, the communal coping intervention represents a distillation of research and clinical experience with family consultation over several decades. In contrast to more directive and educational approaches, the intervention consists entirely of questions, with no direct suggestions or instruction about how patients, partners, or couples should change. These questions comprise 8 sequential modules (Coping Challenges, Trajectory and Focus, Illness as External Invader, You as a Couple, Past Teamwork in Overcoming Adversity, Present and Future Teamwork, Obstacles to Teamwork, and Wrap‐Up), described here in manual‐like detail.     

Running as a way fat women re-story their bodies and construct a runner identity in a North American sociocultural context

AimThis research sought to identify the process by which women who identify as fat or as not having a typical athletic body construct an athletic identity and persist in their running and other athletic endeavors despite body size-related barriers.MethodsFrom an online recruitment effort, 19 North American women runners in larger bodies completed interviews in which they told the story of how they had become runners. A narrative analysis with a feminist, constructivist approach was conducted to identify story types.ResultsFour narrative types were identified: reclaiming the body, reclaiming health, space-making, and future-imagining. Through finding a size- and pace-inclusive running community, running persistently, and completing races, women relinquished the stories they’d believed that their bodies were not athletic since childhood and constructed an identity of runner in a fat body.ConclusionsThese women’s engagement in running is a personal form of resistance against those who define athletic and healthy as “thin” or “fit.” They have found a welcoming athletic community and have moved on to leadership where they are working to make running accessible to other women in bodies like theirs. Those reading these narratives should consider ways in which fat bodies have been excluded from athletics, as well as ways to support the work being done by women runners in fat bodies to redefine health and athleticism.     

Scaffolding a community of competent practitioners: positioning and agency in a training program for narrative counseling

This article explores the scaffolding of learning experiences in a postgraduate program in New Zealand that offers training in narrative counseling. The authors draw on positioning theory to identify student shifts in learning, and in agency, that help build an increasingly skilled and peer-generated context for learning. We describe a selection of exercises and one key assignment, introduced in the course in a particular order, that we believe enable students to step into positions of agency which ultimately allow a competent community of learner-practitioners to emerge. We also describe a dance of positioning for ourselves as teachers in this program. We suggest that, at any given time, our own positioning is tied up with possibilities for student positioning. Acknowledging relationships of power in classrooms, we explore ways to align poststructuralist counseling practices and the teaching of these practices.     

Narrative organisation at encoding facilitated children's long-term episodic memory

This study examined the effect of narrative organisation at encoding on long-term episodic memory in a sample of five- to seven-year-old children (N = 113). At an initial interview, children were asked to narrate a story from a picture book. Six months later, they were interviewed again and asked to recall the story and answer a series of direct questions about the story. Children who initially encoded more information in narrative and produced more complete, complex, cohesive and coherent narratives remembered the story in greater detail and accuracy following the six-month interval, independent of age and verbal skills. The relation between narrative organisation and memory was consistent across culture and gender. These findings provide new insight into the critical role of narrative in episodic memory.     

Arguing about the likelihood of consequences: Laypeople's criteria to distinguish strong arguments from weak ones

High-quality arguments have strong and lasting persuasive effects, suggesting that people can distinguish high- from low-quality arguments. However, we know little of what norms people employ to make that distinction. Some studies have shown that, in evaluating arguments from consequences, people are more sensitive to differences with respect to the desirability of these consequences than to differences in the likelihood that these consequences will occur. This raises the question of whether people lack the criteria to distinguish high-quality from low-quality arguments in support of such claims. In an experiment, 196 participants without any training in argument theory rated their acceptance of 30 claims about the likelihood that a certain outcome would result from a certain action. These claims were supported by an argument from authority, or from cause to effect, or from example. Arguments were systematically manipulated to violate nine specific criteria. For seven out of the nine criteria violation decreased acceptance of the claim supported. These findings show that people can use argument type specific criteria to distinguish high- from low-quality arguments.     

Emotions,narrative and change

There is a wide agreement that emotions are central to the evaluation and understanding of change processes in psychotherapy. Unfortunately, most of the debate on the role of emotions has been influenced by the reductionist view of ‘psychophysiological symbolism’ (Averill 1996). We defend the position that, in order to understand their role in psychotherapy fully, we need to move in the direction of a more complex view of emotions. This paper presents a view of emotionsas social constructed phenomena operating via language and narrative. We present research suggesting that these narratives may be an essential process for understanding psychological disorders, how these disorders are developed and, finally, how they can be changed.     

Emerging perspectives on the structure and function of attitude strength

For more than 20 years, scholars have used the term “attitude strength” to refer to the durability and impactfulness of attitudes, and a large literature attests to the important leverage that this concept offers for understanding and predicting behaviour. Despite its prominence, however, a number of fundamental questions remain regarding the structure and function of attitude strength. In this chapter we draw on a wide range of evidence to clarify the nature of attitude strength. Rather than conceiving of attitude strength as a meaningful psychological construct, we argue that it is better conceptualised as an umbrella term that refers in only the most general way to multiple, separable classes of attitude outcomes, instigated by different antecedents and produced by distinct psychological processes. Although strong attitudes share a set of general qualities—resistance to change, persistence over time, impact on thought and behaviour—there are many distinct routes by which attitudes come to possess these qualities, and many diverse ways in which these qualities manifest themselves. Our analysis shifts the focus away from the structural properties of attitude strength and towards a fuller appreciation of the distinct sources from which attitudes derive their strength. We argue in particular for the value of attending more closely to the social bases of attitude strength, and we illustrate the value of this approach by reviewing several lines of research.