Therapeutic Communication

ABSTRACT

Supervisors in all health care disciplines are required to evaluate supervisee performance. A particularly difficult but essential performance dimension to evaluate is therapeutic rapport, the relationship that evolves between therapist and client. Therapeutic rapport is a complex multifacted construct to investigate. One aspect of rapport which stands out as an integral yet elusive component is how therapist and client work together to create “shared understanding.” This paper reports on the development and reliability testing of tht Therapist Language Coding System (TLCS), a quantitative research tool designed to create operational definitions of certain verbal aspects of shared understanding in a therapeutic relationship. Data from a case study are reported in order to demonstrate the complexity of measuring “shared understanding” and to identify which features of shared understanding can be reliably identified. The findings support the potential to further develop the TLCS, to examine the role of therapeutic communication in the entire therapy process, and to provide supervisees with meaningful feedback related to therapeutic communication.