Transactional Analysis as Psychotherapy Method - A Discourse Analytic Study

Abstract

Operational definitions of categorisations by McNeel (1975) were developed and applied by the author and an independent assessor to complete discourse analysis of 72 hours of transactional analysis group therapy in the style of Goulding & Goulding (1976, 1979) conducted during 1984/85. Results showed that the therapist used an average of 42% of the discourse space and that the therapy did indeed contain TA components, with the two main categories being ‘Feeling Contact’ and ‘Contracts’, and with particular use of TA techniques of ‘talking to Parent projections’, ‘make feeling statement’, ‘mutual negotiation’ and ‘specificity/clarity’. Inter-rater reliability was 46.2% (Araujo & Born 1985), Cohen’s (1960) kappa coefficient shows a spread from slight to moderate agreement, and the Odds Ratio (Viera, 2008) is above 1.0 for most categories.