The good news is we know that a lot of people are doing a lot of good work.  Most of that work is focused on measuring psychological results.  We know, for example, that if you look at most of the controlled research studies in the peer-reviewed journals, most of the work is on the coaching process. The two topics that are being researched most are the coaching process and coaching outcomes.

If you look at how many studies have been done in this time period, the coaching process represents, from 2008 to 2012, more than 100 studies total in more than 80 journals where they were published.

Again, this is peer-reviewed original research; not just what people are writing about what they think. If someone submits a research article of original research, then the people who are reviewing to see whether or not it meets the standards for professional research, the people who are reviewing the submission, don’t know who submitted the article, so it’s a blind review.

In those peer-reviewed journals, there were only basically 100 studies in five years having to do with what goes on in coaching, and a little over 40 about outcomes and not quite 30 about coaching in organizations. There were about 20 articles about coaching versus other helping practices and how they differ.  Then you go down the line regarding other categories of research and the numbers get smaller and smaller and smaller.  So there were several hundred articles total over five years, but basically only two or three of the original 16 categories that were identified by the International Coaching Research Forum out of that list of 100 topics have had any significant coaching done.

One of the interesting thing we found was that the largest number of articles that have been published were primarily in coaching psychology, psychology and coaching journals, but there were a bunch of other publication venues.  If you look at the articles that have been published around the coaching process, roughly 80 of them were in psychology or coaching journals, about 25 in coaching journals and a little more than 50 in psychology journals.  But there were also almost 10 in medicine, more than 10 in business, and several in human resources and in education and training.  So one thing that we learned from this diversity is that coaching really is a multidisciplinary field, that the people who are doing coaching and that are studying and researching coaching come from many different fields.

I did another research study through interviews with a colleague of mine, Doug Riddle.  We interviewed coaches from 25 different disciplines, from art to music to psychology to anthropology to sociology to medicine to education.  The coaches we interviewed had originally been trained in those disciplines and then got into coaching.  We wanted to see whether or not their models and their practices were different–and they were absolutely different.