Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Facilitating conversations“

<p> The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of a social participation based aphasia treatment called conversational coaching. Conversational coaching involves teaching individuals with aphasia and their communication partners (e.g., spouses/caregivers) strategies to facilitate more efficient and meaningful conversation. Two dyads participated in a multiple baseline experimental design across subjects. During baseline sessions, the individual with aphasia watched a videotaped story and then attempted to communicate the story&rsquo;s content to his/her spouse. During treatment sessions, the same general procedure was used, but the investigator coached both participants in the use of selected communicative strategies to facilitate transmission of information and improve the quality of their conversations. The primary dependent variable was the percentage of main concepts successfully co-constructed during conversations. In addition, social outcome measures were used to evaluate the treatment&rsquo;s impact on communicative confidence and quality of life. Positive outcomes were obtained for both dyads</p>

Almost 25 years ago, Clawson, Bostrom, and Anson (1993) drew attention to the fact that the ability to facilitate diverse human and technological interactions will be one of the most essential skills for leading and contributing to all levels of the organization in the future (p. 547). Today, there is an increased interest in studying facilitated meetings, wherein facilitation is most commonly understood as the process of helping groups work effectively to accomplish shared outcomes. Nevertheless, little of the existing research has provided empirically-grounded insights into the practice of facilitation. This thesis aims to close this gap by means of providing a detailed analysis of how facilitators go about doing facilitation work in facilitated computer-supported workplace meetings. The data comprise 53 hours of audio- and video-recorded multi-party interactions among facilitator(s) and participants, occurring during facilitated meetings in a business setting. The data were analysed using conversation analysis to examine the talk and embodied conduct of facilitators and meeting participants, as these unfold sequentially. The first analytic chapter reveals the macro-organization of the facilitated meetings, and it contrasts the practice view with the theoretical approach towards the organization of the facilitated meetings. The second analytic chapter investigates the interactional practices used by the facilitators to unpack participation that has already been elicited, captured, and displayed graphically on the public screen via the use of technology. In the third analytic chapter, I explore how the facilitators use computer software to build visual representations of the participants contributions. In the final analytic chapter, I investigate the practices of decision-making in meeting settings with multiple participants. Overall, this thesis makes innovative contributions to our understanding of the practice of facilitated computer-supported workplace meetings. It challenges existing literature on facilitation by finding that facilitators can orchestrate participant input, questioning the facilitator s role as content-neutral , as proposed by leading practitioners in the field of facilitation (e.g., Kaner et al., 2014). At the same time, it shows how the manipulation of computer software is an accountable action and how the decision-making process occasions or constrains the production of alignment between participant(s) and facilitator(s). The thesis also contributes to conversation analytic research on questioning, as well as the action of unpacking participation. I show that the notion that open-ended questions better elicit participation than interrogatives is generally not supported empirically, at least in this context. The thesis contributes to existing literature on multi-party meeting interaction, showing how the departure from the canonical next-speaker selection technique which involves the use of address terms and address positions in an utterance takes place. Further, it enhances our understanding of how computer software constrains and/or affords progressivity in interaction. In this sense, I enhance our understanding of the concept of agency of artefacts. Finally, I contribute to knowledge on group decision-making, an under-researched yet core activity in facilitated and other types of meetings. Here, I contribute to the body of work on the interplay between deontics and epistemics in interaction. This thesis shows the applicability of conversation analysis to the study of facilitation. By analysing talk and embodied conduct, communicative practices for accomplishing successful facilitated meetings are revealed and these should be of core interest to both professional and novice facilitators.

Caregiver-child conversation is an important platform for children’s development of language and conversational skills and can form the basis for an approach to intervention for children with pragmatic difficulties. While most intervention studies have focused on reporting overall improvements in children’s language and conversational skills as a result of changes in caregiver behaviour, there is limited fine-grained understanding of children’s ability to achieve conversational topic contingency as a result of specific changes in their caregivers’ use of conversational topic turns and/or the facilitative techniques employed by therapists. The studies described in this thesis aim to address this limitation. The following questions are raised: (i) What is the impact of caregiver training intervention programmes on caregivers’ conversational topic turns and facilitative techniques? (ii) What is the impact of caregiver training intervention programmes on children’s conversational topic turns? and (iii) How do specific facilitative techniques impact children’s conversational skills? The first part of this thesis involves establishing the methodology for data transcription and data coding used in the four studies conducted for this thesis. Conversational recordings were transcribed using the CHAT format and conventions. Then a conversational coding system and a facilitative technique coding system were used to code the communicative acts transcribed. The conversational acts coded were topic change (TC), topic extension (TE), topic maintaining responses (TM), and non-relevant responses (NR). The facilitative techniques coded were imitation, expansion, follow-in questions, and follow-in cloze procedures. Inter-rater reliability levels of the transcription and coding of conversational acts and facilitative techniques were high. Study 1 (presented in Chapter 3) was designed to investigate changes following an ‘It Takes Two to Talk’ Hanen programme in the conversations of four caregiver-child dyads where the children had identified language delay. It employed a single subject design and the outcome measures were analysed in three phases: baseline, intervention and follow-up. The outcome measures were the rates of (i) caregivers’ conversational topic turns (i.e., TC, TE and TM), (ii) caregivers’ facilitative techniques (i.e., imitation, expansion, follow-in questions, and follow-in cloze procedures) and (iii) children’s conversational topic turns (i.e., TC, TE and TM). Results showed that all caregivers produced fewer TCs and higher rates of facilitative techniques, while all children produced significantly more TEs following intervention. Individual caregiver patterns of change appeared to be reflected in their children’s conversational skills. This study supports the effectiveness of caregiver group training programmes in improving the quality of caregiver-child conversations and highlighted the importance of investigating individual variations in intervention. Study 2 (presented in Chapter 4) was designed to investigate the changes in conversational skills of three children with features of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) following the dyads’ participation in caregiver-child individual training as part of a multidisciplinary programme for children with ASD. This study employed a case series design and the outcome measures were analysed in two phases (i.e., intervention and follow-up). Similar to Study 1, the outcome measures were rates of the (i) caregivers’ conversational topic turns (i.e., TC, TE and TM), (ii) caregivers’ facilitative techniques (i.e., imitation, expansion, follow-in questions, and follow-in cloze procedures) and (iii) children’s conversational topic turns (i.e., TC, TE and TM). Results of Study 2 showed that one of the three caregivers decreased the rates of TC, and one of them increased the rates of TM following intervention. The caregivers also increased their rates of facilitative techniques (i.e., imitation, expansion and follow-in questions). Concurrently, the children whose caregivers showed positive changes following intervention increased their rates of TCs and TMs. Consistent with the findings of Study 1, high individual variations were observed in the changes exhibited by the caregivers. Study 2 supports the effectiveness of individual training programmes in improving the quality of caregiver-child conversations and emphasizes the importance of investigating individual variations in intervention. Study 3 (presented in Chapter 5) was designed to investigate the qualitative changes made by a child from each of the first two studies. The two children presented with different language levels and aetiologies but both were receiving individualised programmes designed to enhance their conversational abilities. Taking a functional approach to communication development, Study 3 examined how each child (i) collaborated on an activity; (ii) expanded an activity; and (iii) returned to a previous activity or proposed a new activity, through conversational topic turns. Results suggest that the children learnt to collaborate on and expand activities through their caregivers’ repeated use of contingent topic turns (i.e., TM and TE) and facilitative techniques (i.e., expansion, follow-in questions and follow-in cloze procedures). However, they tended to return to a previous activity or propose a new activity when they did not attend to the preceding act or topic, seemed to not comprehend or were not interested in the preceding act or topic, or when their caregivers failed to attend to their preceding act or topic. These findings highlights that while caregivers’ topic turns that are contingent and facilitative help children to advance their activities, caregivers’ topic turns that are non-contingent have the potential to cause the children to end the preceding activity and switch to another activity. Study 4 was designed to compare the effectiveness of expansion, as a technique for facilitating children’s conversational topic turns, with expansion combined with other techniques when implemented by speech and language therapists (SLTs). Using a repeated measures design, this study aimed to compare the effects of expansion alone (EA); expansion combined with wh-questions (EQ); and expansion followed by a cloze procedure (EC) on the conversational skills of eight preschool children with conversational difficulties in conversation with their regular speech-language therapists (SLTs). Results showed that while there were no significant differences in child verbal topic maintaining responses across all techniques, EA elicited a significantly higher number of TEs, more non-verbal TMs and fewer NRs from the children, than either EQ or EC. The positive effects of each technique on the pragmatic appropriateness in conversations suggest that they could be used strategically in language intervention to enhance therapeutic effect. This thesis suggests that caregiver training programmes that focus on following the child’s lead and support caregivers and therapists to use contingent topic turns and facilitative techniques have positive outcomes for children’s conversational development. It also suggested that caregivers’ and therapists’ facilitative strategies that do not obligate responses from the child (i.e., expansion) have better potentials to help the child to expand the scope of conversations than strategies that obligate a response from the child (i.e., wh-questions and cloze procedures). Finally this thesis suggests that family-focussed intervention that follows the child’s lead appears likely to improve the conversational skills of children with a range of diagnoses by helping to address the common underlying features of conversational difficulties.

Den här uppsatsen handlar om facilitatorns roll och yrkeskunnande. En roll som är relativt ny och för de flesta fortfarande helt obekant. Facilitatorn anlitas för att underlätta för grupper att föra samtal och dialog, men också för att gemensamt reflektera. Viktiga förutsättningar för att hitta formerna för fruktbara samarbeten, vilket står högt på många organisationers agendor idag.   I uppsatsen redogör jag inledningsvis för den möteskultur som råder inom organisationer idag. En kultur där medarbetare och chefer avsätter mycket tid i möten som vare sig ger dem själva, organisationen eller samhället något av värde. Det är många gånger envägskommunikation eller förmedling av information. I en tidsanda som ställer höga krav på rationaliseringar och effektivseringar har det dessvärre också blivit så, att tiden för samtal och genuina dialoger succesivt har reducerats till förmån för ökad kommunikation i olika digitala kanaler, inte misnt e-mail och sociala medier. Jag vill hävda att vi människor behöver träffas och samtala för att nå en gemensam och fördjupad förståelse för varandra och våra olika sakfrågor. Vad händer på sikt om vi inte ges möjlighet till gemensam reflektion? Hur ska vi kunna samarbeta om vi inte lär känna varandra och de förutsättningar som råder?   I inledningen redogör jag även för delar av den kunskapsteori som finns kopplat till ämnesområdet yrkeskunnande och teknologi, men också för min mission – att återerövra samtalet som en viktig arbetsmetod. Uppsatsen är skriven i essäistisk stil och det empiriska materialet kommer från de texter jag själv har författat under masterutbildnignens två år då dialogseminariemetoden tillämpats, men också från den dialogseminarieserie som jag själv har genomfört med sex andra facilitatorskollegor. Tillsammans har vi börjat utforska vår gemensamma profession och det yrkeskunnande som vi representerar.   Facilitatorns yrkeskunnande är mångfacetterat och svårfångat, men handlar i mångt och mycket om att vara öppen för människors olikheter. Se dem som berikande. Vara krockfrämjande. Bejaka olika perspektiv och infallsvinklar på saker och ting. Inte vara rädd för att konfrontera. Facilitatorn jobbar med olika tempoväxlingar och har en mängd olika metoder och tekniker till sitt förfogande för att möta olika problemställningar. Planerat eller improviserat. Det finns tydliga analogier med teatern, men också med läkar- och läraryrket. Det handlar om att skapa spänningar och väcka känslor hos deltagarna. Och sedan ta hand om och förvalta de känslor som väckts. Som facilitator blir man aldrig fullärd. Alla grupper är olika och varje ny mötessituation bjuder på nya utmaningar.   För mig känns det som att resan mot bättre vetande precis har börjat. I mina texter kan jag skönja en utveckling över tid, men det finns otaliga gator kvar att utforska. Jag är fortsatt nyfiken och jag vet bestämt att jag vil fortsätta att fördjupa mina kunskaper om facilitatorns yrkeskunnande och gärna då med dialogseminariet som fortsatt forskningsmetod.<br>This thesis explores the role and skills of a professional facilitator. A facilitator is hired to facilitate meetings and other group processes trough dialogue, conversations and active participation, with the purpose of makig reflection and collaboration within and between organisations possible.

Change directed at social justice has been partial at best because it leaves the larger unequal context and structures in place. Social work generally takes place in the context of unequal power relation on individual/cultural/structural levels. The inquiry’s aim is to broaden the perspective on change to facilitate social justice. A qualitative approach that is exploratory and descriptive with a flare of phenomenology was used. Anti-oppressive constructionist research is the point of departure. As such the research attempts to be consistent with values of equality where participants are partners and share in the creation of the inquiry. So in the beginning only preliminary questions designed to provide context and stimulate thought about change are explored. The goals and objectives of the inquiry are to discover and describe the perceptions of activists and literature thus expanding meanings of social justice and how it can be facilitated. In the inquiry, motivation to work for change, what is needed to facilitate social justice, what blocks change for social justice and the values and principles that underlie change for social justice are explored. The inquiry asks the question: How can social workers and the profession of social work facilitate change for social justice?<br>Social Work<br>D.Phil (Social Work)