S u m m a r y

 

Vehviläinen S, Ehrling L, Peräkylä A & Lindfors O (2007)

The diagnostic interview as interaction

 

Psykologia 42: 332&endash;349. Vammala ISSN 0355-1067.

The article examines interactional practices of the diagnostic psychotherapeutic interview. The method used is conversation analysis. The data of video-recorded interviews comes from the Helsinki Psychotherapy Study, a randomized trial that examines and compares the effectiveness of four psychotherapy modalities in the treatment of anxiety and depression disorders. Patients in the data represent all four psychotherapies and recordings come from various points of the follow-up. The conversation analysis of diagnostic interview as an interactional achievement presents analyses of the interviewer's third position turns (i.e. turns following the patients' responses to interview agenda questions) and the way in which these turns shape the interaction, and entail features that are characteristic to a diagnostic interview. Also examined is how patients manage situations where interviewers treat their contributions as insufficient. When describing "doing remarkably better", the patients orient to the credibility of their talk as an interactional task, and gradually shape their talk so as to present a more convincing picture of better mental well-being by adding elements of self-reflective talk into their descriptions.

 

Key words: Diagnostic interview, conversation analysis, institutional interaction, formulations, self-reflective talk.

 

Sanna Vehviläinen, Ph.D., docent, Centre for the Research and Development of University Pedagogy, P.O. Box 9, FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland.

Leena Ehrling, M.Soc., Departmentt of Social Psychology, P.O. Box 54, FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland.

Anssi Peräkylä, Ph.D., Departmentt of Sociology, P.O. Box 18, FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland.

Olavi Lindfors, Lic. Psych., Biomedicum, Helsinki.