A methodological paper explains how guided interviews can bring out details of lived experience and discusses how to assess the resulting accounts.
The facilitator’s attention
What does a facilitator attend to, moment by moment, and how does the choice of what to say arise?
Facilitators decide moment by moment what to say aloud. Micro-phenomenological interviews could describe that skill from the inside, and participants’ ratings would show which parts of it they feel.
Builds on seven works
Why it matters
A circle’s facilitator holds the structure and takes part at the same time, choosing from moment to moment what to notice aloud. The principles are written down; what experienced facilitators actually attend to is not. A precise description would help train new facilitators and make the craft open to study.
What exists
Psychotherapy offers a close precedent. Geller & Greenberg (2002) built a model of therapeutic presence from expert therapists’ accounts: how they prepare for it, what they do while present and what it is like. When Geller et al. (2010) turned the model into a questionnaire, clients’ ratings of their therapist’s presence went with the alliance and with how much a session helped, while therapists’ ratings of themselves predicted little. In the Stanford encounter-group study, leaders were poor judges of who had been harmed (Yalom & Lieberman (1971)).
For Authentic Relating, Silvennoinen (2025) sets out the principles a peer facilitator works with, and Gottlieb (2022) describes self-awareness and attunement to group dynamics in a design team whose members had Authentic Relating training. Neither describes a facilitator’s experience from moment to moment.
A possible design
Film circles and, soon afterwards, interview facilitators about chosen moments with micro-phenomenological interviews (Petitmengin (2006)), using the video to return to each moment. Analyse the interviews for shared structures (Petitmengin et al. (2019)). After each circle, ask participants to rate the facilitator’s presence, and compare the moments facilitators describe as attuned with the ones participants single out.
Pitfalls
Experienced facilitators have a ready vocabulary for what they do, and it can stand in for a description. The interview method is designed to get beneath such accounts. Choose moments from the video rather than the facilitator’s memory, and include facilitators from different schools and with different levels of experience.
Builds on
- 2006Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person: An interview method for the science of consciousness
- 2019Discovering the structures of lived experience: Towards a micro-phenomenological analysis method
Sets out a method for analysing micro-phenomenological interviews: finding how each described moment unfolds in time, drawing out the structures that recur across people, and checking the results.
- 2002Therapeutic presence: Therapists’ experience of presence in the psychotherapy encounter
From expert therapists’ accounts, a model of therapeutic presence in three parts: preparing for it before and outside sessions, what therapists do while present, and what being present is like in a session.
- 2010Therapist and client perceptions of therapeutic presence: The development of a measure
Cautions: Self-report only
A presence questionnaire in therapist and client versions: clients’ ratings of their therapist’s presence went with a stronger alliance and more change after sessions, while therapists’ ratings of themselves predicted little.
- 1971A Study of Encounter Group Casualties
Cautions: Same study as another entry · Self-selected participants
Of 170 students who finished a 30-hour encounter group, 16 were left with lasting harm. Harm clustered under forceful, charismatic leaders who pressed individuals hard instead of working with the group.
- 2025Yhteyspeliohjaajan opas [Connection-game facilitator’s guide]
A practical guide for volunteer peer facilitators of Authentic Relating “connection games”, written as a social-services thesis with the Finnish association Autenttiset ry.
- 2022Relational sensitivity and participatory practice: Exploring poise and punctuation through an empirical study
An autoethnographic study of a design team whose members had Authentic Relating training, asking what self-awareness and attunement to group dynamics look like in practice.