Fragetypen zur Lösungsentwicklung im Business Coaching – Eine gesprächsanalytisch motivierte Untersuchung ihrer sprachlichen, frage- und interaktionstypspezifischen Charakteristika

Abstract

Abstract According to coaching literature, coaches’ questions serve as a central intervention to support clients’ learning and development, i. e., solution-generation and change. To date, there is very little empirical research regarding coaching-specific questions and how they function as agents of change in this professional helping format. The few available psychological coaching outcome studies address ‘solution-focused questions’ due to its (theoretical) endemic orientation towards identifying solutions. Linguistic research, drawing on (methods of) Conversation Analysis, has only recently started to address coaching as a field of scientific inquiry. This paper builds on the scant available research and focusses on questions that support solution generation as the ‘target actions’ of question sequences. These question types are sequence-initiating actions that are intended to generate ideal solution projections and to help identify client’s resources or hindrances; they also focus on solution strategies and measures to find solutions as well as the interim results within the client’s change process. The goal of this contribution is to document and analyze the formal, functional, thematic, and semantic features of questions that generate solutions in business coaching and – on this basis of this analysis – to describe their interaction- and question-type specificities, something which has hitherto not been done. The data analysed here are 12 audio-/video-recorded and transcribed sessions from three authentic coaching processes that form part of a larger corpus of systemic solution-oriented business coaching in German.