"Good job!": Therapists' encouragement, affirmation, and personal address in internet-based cognitive behavior therapy for adolescents with depression

Internet-delivered interventions are generally effective for psychological problems. While the presence of a clinician guiding the client via text messages typically leads to better outcomes, the characteristics of what constitutes high-quality communication are less well investigated. This study aimed to identify how an internet therapist most effectively communicates with clients in internet-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy (ICBT). Using data from a treatment study of depressed adolescents with a focus on participants who had a positive outcome, messages from therapists were analyzed using thematic analysis. The study focused on the therapist's 1) encouragement and 2) affirmation, and how the therapists used 3) personal address. The analysis resulted in a total of twelve themes (Persistence Wins, You Are a Superhero, You Make Your Luck, You Understand, Hard Times, You Are Like Others, My View on the Matter, Time for a Change, Welcome In, Let Me Help You, You Affect Me, and I Am Human). Overall, the themes form patterns where treatment is described as hard work that requires a motivated client who is encouraged by the therapist. The findings are discussed based on the cognitive behavioral theoretical foundation of the treatment, prior research on therapist behaviors, and the fact that the treatment is provided over the internet.

Promoting the Value of Discursive Psychology for the Field of Human Resource Development: A Pedagogical Guide for Qualitative Researchers

To date, the study of how health and wellbeing are actualized in organizations and how an organization’s interactional practices shape an environment that is potentially harmful to health is understudied. Much of the research around this topic has centered on personality and individual differences, as well as health and safety or ergonomics. Little understanding exists of how interactional practices might serve to prioritize health and wellbeing. In this paper, we introduce discursive psychology (DP) – a qualitative approach to studying talk and text that focuses on examining what is accomplished through people’s interactional practices. We provide an overview of DP and discuss its underlying assumptions, analytic process, and quality measures. To illustrate the application of DP to HRD, we include data extracts that highlight the impact of question design. To conclude, we point to how DP might afford HRD scholars opportunities to generate new theoretical understandings about organizational practices.

The Dynamic Paradigm of Ethnic Culture: Variations Across Context, Time, and Meaning

In this article, we argue that counseling psychology research on ethnic culture can be enhanced by drawing upon advancements in conceptual and methodological approaches from other fields. Accordingly, we present the dynamic paradigm of culture to provide counseling psychologists with a useful conceptualization of ethnic culture that serves as the impetus for developing novel research agendas. Grounded in interdisciplinary scholarship from social psychology, developmental psychology, political science, and sociology, this paradigm’s core concept is ethnic culture’s malleable nature; that is, ethnic culture varies across social contexts, across time, and in its meaning across individuals. These three dimensions of ethnic culture are elaborated within three perspectives: (a) the contextual perspective focuses on the situational and domain-specific nature of cultural influences, (b) the temporal perspective characterizes ethnic culture and individuals’ cultural orientation as continually evolving through time, and (c) the constructionist perspective emphasizes the fragmented, subjective, antiessentialist, and performative nature of ethnic culture.