“Asking permission” as a motivational interviewing technique in social services’ online chat: empowering or superfluous?

In recent years motivational interviewing (MI) has become increasingly popular in various social work contexts. In this paper we explore MI practices when applied in social services’ anonymous online chat in Sweden. The data consists of chat logs from social services’ online chat in one Swedish municipality. We use the approach of conversation analysis (CA), particularly developments in recent years in the application of CA to digitally mediated written interaction. In the online sessions social workers sometimes ask for the user’s permission to perform various conversational actions which is a practice recommended in MI literature. However, the literature is ambiguous as to how and in which cases the practice is appropriate. We aim at identifying interactional functions of the technique and discuss to which extent these practices align with the intentions and recommendations in MI literature. The goal of MI is to empower the client and motivate him or her to change. In social services’ online chat, where users are mostly goal-oriented in searching for solutions to their problems, the appropriateness of MI techniques may be controversial. Our analysis shows how the practice is used as a part of preparatory work to deliver user-relevant information or advice. The use of MI technique of asking permission appears more justified in online chat sessions where more intricate relational work is involved, while it may seem superfluous in cases of straightforward inquiries for concrete information.