Recognising children’s involvement in child and family therapy sessions: A microanalysis of audiovisual recordings of actual practice

Children’s right to involvement in practices that address their well-being is frequently highlighted, yet how children exercise involvement in face-to-face encounters has remained fairly unknown. To fulfil our aim of identifying, describing and defining children’s involvement, we conducted an inductive microanalysis of face-to-face dialogue on audiovisual recordings of naturally occurring therapy sessions with children attending social services departments and mental health clinics. The resulting operationalisation generated six dimensions of children’s involvement: participatory, directive, positional, emotional, agentive and narrative. By operationalising how children exercise involvement, we render the abstract concept more amenable to fine-grained analysis, systematic evaluation and criticism. The domains also offer tools to recognise children’s involvement in practice. Lastly, the article discusses practical implications and presents a compass for orientation. Since many conversational elements in institutional talks are generic, the dimensions are potentially transferable to other settings, including school counselling, child protection investigation and clinical psychology. A high inter-analyst agreement, together with similar findings on utterance functions and interactional dominance in other types of dialogues, also enhance the dimensions’ transferability.