However, I do think that statements offer their own set of challenges. By their nature, statements assume that some answers are already possessed. In a sense, statements ARE answers.
Personally, I've increasingly found myself drawn to Questions as a primary medium for exploration. More specifically, I have been drawn to Collaborative Questioning, or entire conversations, dialogues, that consist of reciprocal question. I've played with this kind of discourse in my collaborative storytelling endeavors, and found it to be an extremely powerful tool for setting direction and creating narrative tension (not to mention, a great training tool for my own skills with CBT-style Socratic dialogue). In talking about questions, I often use the analog of "drawing back the bowstring". The way I see it, answers (read: stories) are well and good, but if they come too soon, before the questions are asked, before the bow is drawn, then they will "fall short of their mark".
So, what kind of questions am I starting with?
Can collaborative storytelling be explored in an elegant intervention study? Or would it be better to look at "common factors" of narrative in existing therapy treatments? Or, would it be best to start from the correlational/descriptive angle, looking at a culture like "tabletop gamers" (who engage in varying amounts of formalized collaborative storytelling already) and looking at how different subgroups within that subculture score on various measures?
For any of these directions, what do we want to measure? Quality of life? How is quality of life typically assessed? Divergent thinking? Coder-rated quality of creative output? Beck Depression Inventory? Beck Anxiety Inventory? Should I write and post a blog summarizing the places where I think one might find effects from collaborative storytelling, and some of my ideas about why?
What clinical effects have been documented for drama therapies? What about for other expressive therapies, besides the Pennebaker stuff? Is there any literature for the effects of archetypal therapies, like Jungian or Gestalt therapies?
What kind of intervention studies are my classmates thinking about?
How about you? What are your questions?
