Counseling and new media technologies: A comparison of problem presentations in e-mail and in chat.

In this article, we examine problem presentations in e-mail and chat counseling. Previous studies of online counseling have found that the medium (e.g., chat, email) impacts the unfolding interaction. However, the implications for counseling are unclear. We focus on problem presentations and use conversation analysis to compare 15 chat and 22 e-mail interactions from the same counseling program. We find that in e-mail counseling, counselors open up the interactional space to discuss various issues, whereas in chat, counselors restrict problem presentations and give the client less space to elaborate. We also find that in e-mail counseling, clients use narratives to present their problem and orient to its seriousness and legitimacy, while in chat counseling, they construct problem presentations using a symptom or a diagnosis. Furthermore, in email counseling, clients close their problem presentations stating completeness, while in chat counseling, counselors treat clients' problem presentations as incomplete. Our findings shed light on how the medium has implications for counseling.

Complaining and the management of face in online counseling.

In this article, we analyze how clients in online counseling by email do complaining. Complaining is a "face-threatening act" and can jeopardize the relationship between interlocutors. In online health interventions, we see high dropout rates. We suggest that because the interaction between client and counselor is at the basis of counseling, it is important to understand how a communicative act (e.g., a complaint) that signals potential dropout is constructed sequentially. Based on a corpus of 20 email exchanges, we illustrate how clients constructed complaints over several sentences and sometimes various emails, and how they designed the complaints to minimize threat to the counselor's face. Counselors, in their responses, used various strategies to manage face threats. We show how complaints were mitigated to protect the counseling relationship and suggest that this is useful knowledge for health professionals.