Social Work Commons^™

Centering The Voice Of The Client: On Becoming A Collaborative Practitioner With Low-Income Individuals And Families, Celia Falicov, Ora Nakash, Margarita Alegría

School for Social Work: Faculty Publications

Despite current interest in collaborative practices, few investigations document the ways practitioners can facilitate collaboration during in-session interactions. This investigation explores verbatim psychotherapy transcripts to describe and illustrate therapist’s communications that facilitate or hinder centering client’s voice in work with socioeconomically disadvantaged populations. Four exemplar cases were selected from a large intervention trial aimed at improving shared decision making (SDM) skills of psychotherapists working with low-income clients. The exemplar cases were selected because they showed therapist’s different degrees of success in facilitating SDM. Therapist’s verbalizations were grouped into five distinct communicative practices that centered or de-centered the voice of clients. …