THE ARTICLE

Bill Carrier:  You and Sunny Rostron collaborated on an article about that topic recently, surveying the written research in coaching and coming up with some important conclusions.  Can you tell us more about that?

Lew Stern:  Sure.  Anthony Grant published his bibliography in 2011 of what research had recently been done in coaching.  The extensive bibliography did not restrict itself to just peer-reviewed journals or original research.  It was on anything having to do with coaching.

Sunny and I decided that we would take a deeper look at peer-reviewed research published in journals from many disciplines.  For our research, we took the 100 original topics that the ICRF suggested for research and, through a systematic analysis; we organized the 100 topics into 16 categories of research that needed to be done.

In our review of the research, we included all the peer-reviewed articles we could find on the web in a wide variety of publications. Anthony Grant came up with hundreds and hundreds of references on all the articles that had been written. We came up with more than 200 research articles that had been written which were either not included in Tony Grant’s work or had been done since he published his bibliography and weren’t included in his research.  There were almost 90 peer-reviewed journals that had published original research in coaching in the last five years.  They’re in every discipline you can imagine, from psychology to coaching specifically, to medicine, business management, organizational development, human resource development, education and training, finance and economics and other disciplines, even construction management, the Journal of Engineering, the Journal of Safety Research, the Journal of Social Work Practice, the American Geriatric Society, and Leadership in Management and Engineering.

ICRF CATEGORIES OF RESEARCH

We did an analysis of the 100 questions originally asked at the ICRF and came up with 16 topical categories.  We did our research to find out the degree to which each of those categories of the 100 questions had been studied since they were raised at the original ICRF meeting. Had they been answered?  Had there been any research in those topics?  If you like, I can get into what those topics were, just to give you a flavor of them.  Would that be helpful?

Bill Carrier: Yes, it would be very interesting.

Lew Stern: Okay.  I’m going to run through them very quickly, but you’ll get a sense of it.  One topic is coach education and training. Is it being done, where is it being done, how is it being done?  What’s the curriculum, who are the students, what kind of results, how long does it take?  Those who are certified, do they get better results than not?

The coaching relationship, how do you define it, and what goes on for chemistry building and matching between a coach and a coachee? And does it matter if there’s a gender similarity or difference, and how about style and the background of the coach in the relationship?