Getting involved in coaching research with Fiona Day Consulting LTD
The evidence base for coaching and coaching psychology is rapidly growing, and now includes multiple meta-analyses and systematic reviews. However, as in all areas of professional practice, there is much work to be done to continue to build up the scientific basis underpinning coaching. Particularly as regards the coaching process itself and how coach and client interact with each other is still under researched.
Doctors and public health specialists have a role to participate in research: it helps them to evaluate their practice objectively; advance their discipline; learn skills to improve their practice; as well as being able to question, evaluate and test different approaches objectively (1). It is well known that all patients have better health outcomes in research active hospitals, even if individual patients are not part of research (2).
I have always initiated, collaborated with, and participated in research as a doctor and as a public health leader, ranging from publishing audits, to initiating and co-supervising a PhD in health psychology, and setting up a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to improve staff health outcomes. You can see my publications here.
I’ve also worked hard to ensure that my coaching practice is as professional as my former medical and public health practice: to this end I have been actively involved in undertaking research as a Coach and as a Coaching Psychologist. This includes the recent publication of my outcomes in BMJ Leader here.
Questioning Sequences in Coaching” (QueSCo) Project
I recently partnered with an international and interdisciplinary research project “Questioning Sequences in Coaching” (QueSCo). This was funded for a duration of 36 months (starting March 2021) with a total amount of 900,000 EUR by national funding organisations in Austria (FWF, Lead Agency), Germany (DFG) and Switzerland (SNF). It is based at the English Department of the University of Klagenfurt, the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, and the Department of Applied Psychology at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. The project is headed by Assoz. Prof. Dr. Eva-Maria Graf.
Questions are a core intervention in helping professions such as psychotherapy or coaching. The project investigated questioning practices in business coaching. Coaching builds on the interaction between coach and client, addresses clients’ work-related problems and aims to facilitate clients’ change. Questioning sequences is considered a crucial coaching: analysis of questioning sequences addresses a principal research gap.
The aim of the project was the development of a coaching-specific typology of questioning sequences and to investigate their coaching-specific change potentials. The project used a mixed-methods research design, which combines qualitative linguistic and qualitative/quantitative psychological methods. The data consisted of authentic, video-taped, and linguistically transcribed coaching processes from systemic solution-oriented executive coaching. The data was completely anonymized.
Illustration of how data examples are used in linguistic publications
The example is taken from Jautz, S., Graf, E., Fleischhacker, M. & F. Dionne (in prep.). Agenda setting in first sessions of business coaching – A focus on coaches’ practices to manage the agenda and establish the working alliance. Frontiers in Psychology
How to read the example:
Example 5 refers to the number of examples within the article
CO7 is coach number 7 in our current corpus
KL1 is client 1 of CO7
S1 refers to session 1
598 refers to the line in the transcript
[21:27] refers to the minute in the transcript
Dr Fiona Day, MBChB, FFPH, CPsychol, Fiona Day Consulting LTD
References
- Jacob H. Why all doctors should be involved in research. BMJ. 2016 Feb 23;352:i164.
- Saving and Improving Lives: The Future of UK Clinical Research Delivery [Internet]. GOV.UK. [cited 2023 May 24]. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-future-of-uk-clinical-research-delivery/saving-and-improving-lives-the-future-of-uk-clinical-research-delivery
