Stypka, Kazimiera2018-06-282018-06-2819922018-06-28http://hdl.handle.net/1828/9554This dissertation is a descriptive study of clients' strategic self-presentations in counselling. Using naturally occurring counselling interviews as a source of data and an adaptation of ethnomethodology and conversational analysis as the primary research method, clients' strategic self-presentations are explicated and formally described. The focus of the study is on the conversational, interactional and linguistic practices used by clients in the production of their strategic self-presentations. The data consist of twenty tape-recorded and transcribed counselling interviews collected through the counselling services of a community college. After the initial analysis of the data, instances of clients' strategic self-presentations are selected and analyzed in detail. The findings of this study are the following: (1) that clients in counselling situations use various strategic self-presentations, such as: self-enhancement, self-promotion, ingratiation and self-aggrandizement; (2) that clients construct their self-presentational strategies according to their own interactional style, their perception of the counselling and the goal of the counselling; (3) that the main conversational practices in the construction of clients' self-presentations include: adjacency pairs, through which the client initiates the self-presentational talk, and formulation, through which the counsellor acknowledges or recognizes the accomplishment of the client-initiated strategy; (4) that other interactional features and devices are used in the construction of clients' strategic self-presentations, including paralinguistic features, agreements and compliments. This study represents a different approach to the study of interaction between clients and counsellors, through the examination of discourse as it occurs in actual counselling interviews.enAvailable to the World Wide WebCounselor and clientCounselingClients' strategic self-presentation in counselling through discourseThesis