Mappare il cambiamento. Analisi dei processi interattivi in terapia familiare.

This study focuses on process research of the discursive interactions in family therapy. Nowadays this research area is particularly critical for several reasons: first of all it has not developed over the years and also continues to suffer a lack of appropriate tools to investigate systemic family therapy. Moreover the incongruence between theory, epistemology and research tools makes difficult for research findings to be relevant for clinical practice (Oka & Whiting, 2013; Pinsoff & Wynne , 2000). Despite these limitations, in recent years there has been an increase in studies related to process research in family therapy that focused on the development of appropriate methods of investigation . Many of these research adopt a dialogical perspective to study therapeutic process. Among the latter Grossen and Salazar Orvig (2011) and Seikkula , Laitila and Robert (2012) have illustrated how change processes in psychotherapeutic dialogues are favored by the emergence of a plurality of viewpoints that feed the negotiation and the redefinition of both the narration itself and the way something is narrated. Following these results, the present research aims at deepening the understanding of the micro changes that occur in a therapeutic conversation, and focuses on the process of co-construction that takes place between therapist and family members. For this purpose , five first therapy sessions have been analyzed. The choice of this specific moment stems from the idea that the very beginning of a therapeutic process has a lot of potential in offering therapists a variety of information that can help them in becoming aware of the families interactive style in order to make further therapeutic decisions/moves. In particular, three different studies characterize this research project, and each of them has specific goals. The first study aimed at: mapping how participants locate themselves in relation to the themes different that emerges during the session; identifying some interactive patterns which can describe the interactive and symbolic form of such movements. Given the purpose of the study, we opted for a qualitative design based on a three step analysis aimed at identifying: themes, positions and dialogical patterns. Each session has been divided into thematic sequences. The identified thematic sequences (160) have been composed into main themes. Each thematic sequence has been analyzed in order to explore: how each present participant positions himself/herself and his/her interlocutors in the ongoing interaction (enacted positioning); how each participant positions himself/herself, his/her interlocutors and evoked others in the narrated event (represented positioning). In order to map these aspects, every thematic sequence has been divided into utterances. The overall number of analyzed sentences is 11563. The analytic procedure allowed us to distinguish nine different patterns. The second study aimed at analyzing the quality of interaction in the identified patterns. The study has been conducted through the application of a quantitative method based on the theory of social networks, a relational approach to study social interaction ( Mazzoni , 2005; Scott , 1991; Wasserman & Faust , 1994). In particular, each thematic sequence related to a specific pattern has been analyzed in order to identify: the interactive network made of present and evoked participants; the positioning network, made of enacted and represented positioning. The analysis were carried out employing Social Network Analysis and a variant of SNA, called Positioning Network Analysis (PNA) (Annese & Traetta, 2011). The results highlight the interactive context that characterizes the different patterns. Moreover, this study allowed us to test an innovative application of this methodology to the field of therapeutic conversation. Finally, the third study explored how therapist’s interventions and therapist’s positioning interconnect, and how this interconnection may impact on the development of a given pattern. The classification of the therapist’s questions is an established methodology in the field of family therapy and it is used for both analyzing interaction and training family therapists (Hornstrup, Tomm & Johansen 2009; Mosconi et al., 1996; Penn, 1985; Tomm 1988). Interactive patterns gave the opportunity to look at therapist’s questions through a different lens. Indeed, the results show the processual and qualitative characteristics of interventions throughout the development of different interactive contexts.