Children’s right to involvement in practices that address their well-being is frequentlyhighlighted, yet how children exercise involvement in face-to-face encounters hasremained fairly unknown. To fulfil our aim of identifying, describing and defining children’s involvement, we conducted an inductive microanalysis of face-to-face dialogue onaudiovisual recordings of naturally occurring therapy sessions with children attendingsocial services departments and mental health clinics. The resulting operationalisationgenerated six dimensions of children’s involvement: participatory, directive, positional,emotional, agentive and narrative. By operationalising how children exercise involvement, we render the abstract concept more amenable to fine-grained analysis, systematic evaluation and criticism. The domains also offer tools to recognise children’sinvolvement in practice. Lastly, the article discusses practical implications and presents acompass for orientation. Since many conversational elements in institutional talks aregeneric, the dimensions are potentially transferable to other settings, including schoolcounselling, child protection investigation and clinical psychology. A high inter-analystagreement, together with similar findings on utterance functions and interactionaldominance in other types of dialogues, also enhance the dimensions’ transferability.

Children’s in-session involvement in child and family therapies correlates with both positive and negative treatment outcomes. Thus, it is important to gain a better understanding of the clinical practices that facilitate children’s involvement in therapy sessions so that practitioners can employ them with greater precision. To address this need, we conducted a study to answer the following question: What clinical practices facilitate children’s in-session involvement in child and family therapies? The data consisted of 16 extant audiovisual recordings of child and family therapy sessions and 24 stimulated-recall interviews with the participants in the recordings. Following constructivist grounded theory and incorporating storyline as an additional analytical technique, we have constructed a framework consisting of four involvement-enhancing practices: managing time, staying relevant, adjusting intensity, and facilitating inclusion. Furthermore, by detailing some of the complex processes that practitioners navigate when they facilitate children’s involvement, our study adds a multilayered and dynamic dimension to the list of already established involvement facilitators. It may be used to moderate an overstandardized work culture that continues to characterize services that address children’s needs. The results may be applied to other institutional encounters, providing resonance beyond the analyzed therapy sessions.

This paper presents an analysis of how three interlocutors sequentially organize and accomplish mutual understanding in naturally occurring audiovisual recordings of therapy sessions. The analysis is in keeping with microanalysis of face-to-face dialog (MFD) and follows operational definitions of three-step micro-processes that interlocutors use when they calibrate new information; that is, how they agree that they have understood each other's words and actions well enough for current practical purposes. Pointing to some of the complexities that characterize triadic interactions, the analysis contributes with new documentations of 'suspended', 'nested', 'branched', 'multi-paced', and 'mixed interpretations' calibrations. The analysis also demonstrates how interlocutors may calibrate the 'tone' of an utterance before the topical content is mutually understood. The results and their implications may be relevant to practitioners of institutional talks at large, where the quality and outcome of, for instance, assessments and interventions largely rely on accomplishing mutual understanding.