Bibliographic Details
| Title: |
Client contact styles in online therapeutic work via e-mail. |
| Authors: |
Stummer, Gudrun |
| Source: |
Counselling Psychology Review. 2009, Vol. 24 Issue 2, p14-23. 10p. 1 Black and White Photograph. |
| Subjects: |
Internet in medicine, Patients, Email systems, Email, Clients, Cost effectiveness, Professional-client communication, Client relations, Medical research |
| Abstract: |
E-mail is a cost effective and convenient way of connecting clients and professionals. The emerging research into online psychotherapy, counselling and advice work suggests that e-mail does enable effective therapeutic work. The present article discusses client contact styles used to engage with an online advice service, which is part of an action research project into the development and running of an online sexual health and relationship skills website called Sex-and-Relationships1. The methodology used for this study was action research, a cyclical process of enquiry, which uses both qualitative and quantitative data. It has been used to explore and develop practice-based and situational knowledge of how to best deliver an online advice or counselling service via Sex-and-Relationships. This article will present figures for overall usage of the e-mail advice service over two years to contextualise data on how service users have engaged with the service. Two client contact styles are identifiable in the data, namely single question-response pairs and in-depth, therapeutic dialogues, which will be illustrated by two case vignettes. Both contact styles are appropriate with respect to individual clients' needs and can be supported via e-mail. Practitioners working online need to have considerable experience of offline long-term work to engage in therapeutic dialogue online, but also need to be able to tolerate the abruptness of the majority of short online exchanges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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| Database: |
Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection |
