Questioning Sequences in Coaching

The international and interdisciplinary research project analyzes questioning sequences in coaching. With its coaching data from Austria, Germany and Switzerland, the project covers the entire German- speaking coaching market. Coaching builds on the interaction between coach and client, addresses clients work-related problems and aims to facilitate clients change. Theoretical models describe change via specific developmental phases clients pass through. While these phases cannot be observed, the sequentially organized coaching interaction and how it develops across the continuum of coaching sessions can be observed. The sequential relation between coaches and clients turns within a coaching conversation thereby guarantee the transformation of clients experience and the development of new ideas and thereby contribute to the process of change across successful coaching interactions. Although coaching is widely practiced in the Western world, its academic foundation is still underdeveloped, particularly as regards the coaching process. Questioning practices, considered as a crucial intervention, represent a principal research gap. The project aims to develop a coaching-specific typology of questioning sequences (coachs question clients response coachs reaction to clients response) and to investigate their coaching-specific change potentials, i.e. how questions contribute to change in and for the clients. The study uses authentic, video-taped and linguistically transcribed coaching processes, which are analyzed within a mixed-methods research design that draws on qualitative linguistic and qualitative/quantitative psychological methods.

QueSCo provides the largest corpus of systemic solution-oriented business coaching with 14 coaches and 24 clients. The data comprises 24 processes, 124 sessions with a duration of 193 hours. 71 sessions have been transcribed according to cGAT. For the coding, 14 processes (12 coaches, 14 clients) / 50 sessions with a length of 60.5 hours were used. A typology of coaching-specific questions was developed linguistically by (re-)analyzing the coaching data. In collaboration with the psychologists, 12 coaching-specific question types were identified and assigned to 7 main functions. The question typology was expanded to include categories for further sequence positions, i.e. client reactions, coach reactions and coach and client actions preceding the question. Evaluation criteria were defined to assess the local effectiveness . The coaches' reactions and sequence evaluations were developed linguistically and psychologically. A coding manual was developed to operationalize the two typologies (Graf et al. 2024); the corpus was coded in MAXQDA (interrater reliability 0.7). The master code consisted of 121 (sub)codes, a total of 87,200 codes were assigned. 3,023 question sequences with 3,691 questions were identified, i.e. question sequences make up 83% of the transcripts: The central importance of questions is proven. WH-questions were the most common type (1,629), followed by declarative questions (996) and verb-first questions (792), i.e. both open and closed questions are relevant. The most common types are "questions topicalizing problematicity" (24%), "questions on relationship management" (21%) and "questions topicalizing resources" (18%). Overall, solution-oriented questions account for 41% and problem-oriented questions for 26%, illustrating the solution-oriention of the interaction. Client reactions to all question types are predominantly responsive. "Client does more" (client gives an answer and provides additional information) and 'Client participates' (client gives an appropriate answer) together account for 73% (44% and 29% respectively) of responses. This shows a high level of client compliance. The most common coach reaction is "clarification and elaboration request" (48%), i.e. coaches respond by addressing unclear aspects or asking for further information, followed by "transformation" (15%), i.e., coaches initiate a decisive change of perspective, e.g. from problem to solution . From a psychological perspective (consideration of topic, affect and relationship management), coaches are highly responsive and client-centered. Following the linguistic definition of local effectiveness (sequence fulfillment), 46% of the sequences were "fulfilled", i.e. successfully completed, 35% were "extended", and 19% were "not fulfilled". According to the psychological assessment, rating sequences on a 5-point scale, 52.3% of the sequences received 5 points, 31.7% received 4 points and 16% received 3 points or less. This percentage indicates a general (local) effectiveness of question sequences in coaching. It is based on the responsiveness of clients and coaches.