Open Dialogue: A case study on the influence of sharing or withholding reflections during a network meeting

In Open Dialogue, sharing of reflections by professionals constitutes an important contribution to promoting a polyphonic dialogue between participants. In the inner dialogue, past and future influence the present moment. In this study, we explore the influence of sharing or withholding reflections by professionals on the interplay between inner and outer dialogue. A case study was used with a multi-perspective methodology, which combined video recordings of a network meeting and interviews by using video-stimulated recall with the clients separately, and social workers together afterward. We found that the sharing of reflections by professionals stimulates the inner dialogue and creates an opening for sharing these in the outer dialogue. In addition, we observed that when reflections are withheld, the client's inner dialogue still continues, but their inner dialogue was not shared in the outer dialogue.