Discourses of Counselling: HIV Counselling as Social Interaction - Softcover

Silverman, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803976623 ISBN 13: 9780803976627

Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd, 1996

Synopsis

In this book, the author offers an analytical account of how counselling, as a process, is dynamically constructed through the interaction of counsellor and client. Drawing on research on counselling of clients undergoing an HIV test, the author explores the ways in which conversations between counsellors and patients reflect, embody and subtly alter assumptions about the purpose, method and practice of counselling. This text should be of interest to researchers and students of counselling, psychotherapy and associated helping professions as a critical appreciation of the modes of engagement between counsellor and client. Practitioners - particularly those within the domain of HIV and other health counselling - should be stimulated to reflect on and respond to Silverman's analysis in their own practice. This book should also be useful reading for researchers and students in the traditions of sociological work on interactionism, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, applying these approaches in a sophisticated manner to the interactional and conversational analysis strategies adopted in a health promotion environment.

About this title

Review:

`This study of the tacit communicative skills that inform verbal interaction between counsellors and clients in various kinds of HIV counselling... primarily informed by conversation analysis... is sensitive to the requirements of counsellors who will want to know the practical benefits for them which emerge from this kind of study of interaction in counselling sessions' - British Journal of Sociology

`Many texts claim to be based in, or to be written for, the scientist-practitioner (or the practitioner-researcher), yet seldom have I read a book that reaches this audience in such a useful and effective manner. This book not only describes how research can inform practice, but offers the experience as you read it... I was particularly struck by the sensitivity to language that Silverman illustrates throughout the book. I found that, without trying, I was listening to my clients with a different attunement, somehow noticing subtle nuances with a greater range of possible interpretations... Regardless of paradigm, the professional who has a role as a listener will be enriched by reading this book and thinking seriously about their own practice' - The Psychologist

`This book is the result of several years' research into HIV counselling... a collage of intertwining and reflexive segments on different aspects of HIV counselling... Talk about sex and death can be highly absorbing, especially when presented with the fastidious exactitude of CA, and here the transcriptions... are of a rare quality. Introducing and addressing such "delicate" topics... is easier if the counsellor is "in control of" the agenda. Thus there is often an ambiguity in the interactive status of interviews which lean on the one hand towards the patient-centred approach, and on the other the retaining of control by the professional... While power and resistance may be ubiquitous in everyday life, it is through the detailed examination of their local reproduction in talk that we are able to gain empirical knowledge of their actual form and practical implications. In few areas of contemporary life could this assertion be made more precisely than in the discourses on sexuality which Silverman examines in this study' - Journal of Sociolinguistics

`This book reports the author's conversation analyses (CA) of counselling sessions, largely in HIV testing clinics in the USA and UK... Throughout, the text contains examples from actual interactions illustrating the sometimes clever and subtle skills deployed by the speakers... It is perhaps in this detail that the quality of the book lies. In this respect the author's claims for the superiority of CA's transcription techniques above the invented examples and tidied up transcripts of most existing accounts of counselling are borne out. For practitioners reading the book, it must be like looking into a mirror for the first time, perceiving just what it is they have always done without realising it... The view that meanings of utterances can be understood by attending to the preceding moves is also strongly supported, the relevant material being made fully available to the reader; herein lies the chief claim of CA to fulfil conventional standards of scientific quality' - Medical Sociology News

About the Author:

David Silverman is Visiting Professor in the Business School, University of Technology, Sydney, Emeritus Professor in the Sociology Department, Goldsmiths’ College and Adjunct Professor in the School of Education, Queensland University of Technology. He has lived in London for most of his life, where he attended Christ's College Finchley and did a BSc (Economics) at the London School of Economics in the 1960s. Afterwards, he went to the USA for graduate work, obtaining an MA in the Sociology Department, University of California, Los Angeles. He returned to LSE to write a PhD on organization theory. This was published as The Theory of Organizations in 1970.

Apart from brief spells teaching at UCLA, his main teaching career was at Goldsmiths College. His three major research projects were on decision making in the Personnel Department of the Greater London Council (Organizational Work, written with Jill Jones, 1975), paediatric outpatient clinics (Communication and Medical Practice, 1987) and HIV-test counselling (Discourses of Counselling, 1997). 

He pioneered a taught MA in Qualitative Research at Goldsmiths in 1985 and supervised around 30 successful PhD students. Since becoming Emeritus Professor in 1999, he has continued publishing methodology books. David regularly runs qualitative research workshops for five universities in Sydney and Brisbane. He has also run workshops for research students in Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Sri Lanka and Tanzania. Since 2000, he has done voluntary work with people with dementia. resident in an old people’s home

Besides all this, David's other interests include classical music, literary fiction, bridge, county cricket and spending time with his grandchildren.

About this edition

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0803976623
• ISBN 13: 9780803976627
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 257