Department of Counseling & Educational Psychology, School of Education, Indiana University, USA.
University of Leicester, The Greenwood Institute, UK.
Clin Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2023 Apr;28(2):554-566. doi: 10.1177/13591045221092887. Epub 2022 May 26.
Child mental health assessments are complex and involve the analysis of data from multiple sources to inform treatment decisions. Question sequences are central to mental health assessments; however, little research has examined the functions of questions in child mental health interactions, particularly questions that aim to elicit information from children that might be used to inform diagnosis and treatment. In this study, we utilize a large corpus of video-recorded child mental health assessments to examine the use and function of a particular kind of wh-question-circular questions-that is, questions that seek clients' views on other family members' feelings, actions, and thoughts. Using conversation analysis, we identified three "broad" functions of circular questions in child mental health assessment. Our findings provide clinicians with clinically relevant examples for using circular questions to more fully involve children in the assessment process and acquire valuable information for diagnosis.
儿童心理健康评估较为复杂，需要分析来自多个来源的数据，以辅助治疗决策的制定。问题序列是心理健康评估的核心要素；然而，鲜有研究关注儿童心理健康互动中问题的功能，尤其是旨在从儿童那里获取可能用于诊断和治疗的信息的问题。在本研究中，我们利用大量视频记录的儿童心理健康评估资料，研究了一种特殊的 wh-疑问句——循环疑问句的使用和功能，即旨在了解来访者对其他家庭成员的感受、行为和想法的问题。我们运用会话分析，确定了循环疑问句在儿童心理健康评估中有三种“广泛”的功能。研究结果为临床医生提供了具有临床意义的示例，说明如何使用循环疑问句让儿童更充分地参与评估过程，并获取有助于诊断的有价值信息。
