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METHODS article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Quantitative Psychology and Measurement
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1447587
This article is part of the Research Topic Best Practice Approaches for Mixed Methods Research in Psychological Science - Volume II View all 18 articles
Therapeutic Communication Laboratory: Integrating mixed methods with digital tools and reflective professional practice
Provisionally accepted- 1 Independent researcher, Barcelona, Spain
- 2 Human Behavior Laboratory, School of Health Sciences, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland
- 3 Faculty of Psychology, Institute of Neurosciences, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
- 4 Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
- 5 Department of Digital Humanities, Faculty of Humanities, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
Communication has been recognized as the matrix (Ruesch & Bateson, 1951) in which the helping professionals operate in order to generate changes. In particular, psychotherapy is fundamentally a professional practice based, from its origins, on conversation. This study aims to establish the methodological and instrumental foundations of a therapeutic communication laboratory utilizing a mixed-methods approach. The primary objective is to develop and implement tools and procedures for the effective analysis of psychotherapy session recordings. . We present a methodological proposal containing the foundations of a therapeutic communication laboratory which allows a new dialogue between professional practice and empirical research based on observation. We describe the processes of data incorporation and analysis of recorded sessions from a mixed methods perspective (Qual-Quan-Qual). The automation and integration of various digital tools, aligned with this mixed methods approach, are essential to achieve closer collaboration between practitioners and researchers. The incorporation of the transcription and labelling processes of the recordings into analysis tools such as Elan and Theme allows us to advance in these objectives. This approach enhances the training and supervision of psychotherapy professionals and bridges the gap between theoretical intervention models and their practical application. From a research standpoint, it enables the development of a knowledge base and observational instruments to advance the creation of more effective intervention models.
Keywords: Therapeutic Communication Laboratory conversational analysis in psychotherapy, Therapeutic communication, Analysis of temporal patterns, mixed methods, Observational methodology, Motivational Interviewing, Discourse of change
Received: 11 Jun 2024; Accepted: 14 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Molinero, Jonsson, Anguera, Hunyadi and Szekrényes. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Francisco Molinero, Independent researcher, Barcelona, Spain
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