SEARCH FOR A PARALLEL PROCESS: COMPARISON OF THE STYLISTIC COMPLEXITY OF THE LANGUAGE AND SEMANTIC COMMUNICATION OF SUPERVISOR AND THERAPIST (COMPUTER-ASSISTED LANGUAGE ANALYSIS SYSTEM, REFLECTION PROCESS

This study investigated parallel process between a supervisor and his therapists. One male supervisor, two female therapists, and two couples seeking therapy were the subjects. Socratic supervision was used with one therapist while the other therapist received specific suggestions. Five therapy sessions and the subsequent supervision sessions were videotaped and transcribed. Four minutes of direct talk-time from each supervision and therapy session were analyzed for verb usage and Average Sentence Length (ASL) by the Computer Assisted Language Analysis System (CALAS). The results indicated that the supervisor's supervision styles failed to differ in either verb usage or ASL. Further analysis indicated that patterning did occur between the supervisor's and therapists' relative overall use of verb types. However, the inconsistency of the across session patterns did not lend support for parallel process. The therapists' ASLs were more complex than that of the supervisor, thus possibly requiring the clients to spend more time processing what was being said. The results may not be generalized beyond the present study.