Revisiting How Sport Psychology Can Best Be Illustrated Steven A. Christensen (christen@usq.edu.au) Centre for Rural and Remote Area Health University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba Qld 4350 Australia Andrea Lamont-Mills (lamontm@usq.edu.au) Centre for Rural and Remote Area Health University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba Qld 4350 Australia Abstract In this paper we revisit the question, how can sport psychology best be illustrated? There have been many interesting works produced in recent years that have displayed conversations between sport psychologists and athletes. In our view there are problems in analysing and commenting on transcripts that are not based on real-life psychological practice. Many works have not considered the importance of recording and representing real-life practice, and so have glossed over the original question, how can sport psychology best be illustrated? This has lessened what they can contribute to understanding how sport psychology is practiced. To illustrate this point, we present a short extract of real-life therapy talk that centres on the therapist’s question, have you seen a psychologist before? The audio recording of this psychologist-client talk was presented in our conference presentation, and we display transcripts of this therapy talk in three different forms in this paper: a Jeffersonian transcript, a verbatim transcript, and an idealised script. We use data from these transcripts to show that choosing a transcription format has consequences for how we can understand psychological practice. Introduction There has been a growing interest in understanding how we do sport psychology in recent years. Mark Andersen has championed this cause and has produced works that have focused on how service delivery 1 is accomplished. Doing Sport Psychology (Andersen, 2000a) and Sport Psychology in Practice (Andersen, 2005) are two works that have used examples of sport psychologist-athlete conversations to display aspects of service delivery. Andersen has supplemented these transcripts of talk with comments and interpretations from leading practitioners to make sport psychology practice explicit and more visible. This approach has been well received in coaching (e.g., Schiffer, 2002), sport psychology (e.g., Morris, 2001), and physical education (e.g., Gaughan, 2001). Together with other works (e.g., Brewer, Van Raalte, & Petitpas, 2000; Giges & Petitpas, 2000), they have helped to establish consultant-client conversations as a 1 We shall refer to service delivery, doing sport psychology, and sport psychology practice interchangeably in this paper. legitimate source data for examining how sport psychology is done in real-life encounters. Andersen (2000b) begins this work by asking; How can doing sport psychology service best be illustrated? This is the focus of our paper. It is a significant issue that we feel requires further discussion. So in this paper we revisit this issue and use a short extract of real-life therapy talk to raise key points about this question. We argue that decisions about how to represent sport psychology practice impacts on both the data that you have available to examine service delivery, and the analytic resources that that you can draw upon to understand these professional interactions. Therapy Talk The forthcoming data is the opening 40 seconds of talk between a psychologist 2 and a client 3 and was recorded by the psychologist and then transcribed by the first author. This therapy talk is represented in three different forms so that we can illustrate how real-life psychology practice can be examined. Jeffersonian Transcript Extract 1 displays a Jeffersonian transcript of this opening to the therapy talk. The line numbers shown in the first column display the serial nature of the conversation. The labels (i.e., P or C) in the second column show which participant is talking during the conversation. The text in the third column shows the talk that is produced by a participant. Extract 1 displays the verbatim speech between these two participants and some of the paralinguistic features (e.g., pronounced in-breaths) used by them to produce this talk. These features are important because they allow us to document some of the more subtle elements of this conversation, and provide data for a more fine- grained analysis of the interaction. The transcript uses some of the conventions established by Gail Jefferson 4 2 The psychologist is provisionally registered and this data is from material that was recorded for a skills-based post- graduate course. 3 A pseudonym is being used. 4 See pages ix-xvi in Atkinson and Heritage (1984) to see an annotated illustration of these transcription conventions.