TILT – Therapeutic Innovations in Light of Technology
Research Review
Online Coachin – the Fu Reflecting the breadth of uses of the term, examination of research into online coaching reveals studies of a broad range of interventions in contexts that are equally diverse. Anecdotally, most focus on educational and health settings, with fewer studies on executive or business coaching being listed in the research literature, although there are clear indications on things like the return on investment (ROI) for coaching in general, some of which will include online delivery of services. Overlap with counselling and psychotherapy research can allow for at least some transferability of that larger evidence base to the realm of personal or life coaching but it remains clear that there is much potential for sound empirical data to be added to the existing literature in all these areas, with valuable results for the whole field. Comprehensive reviews of the evidence base – especially those looking specifically at technologically mediated methods – remain to be carried out for several types of coaching, although there are some exceptions. The situation is partially obscured by the very prevalence, diversity and seemingly widespread
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acceptance of distance provision in coaching, with a number of studies incorporating reports of technologically mediated interventions of one kind or another without necessarily highlighting them sufficiently to be located by the usual systematic search methods, meaning that useful evidence can slip under the radar. Nonetheless, interesting features of the online coaching world still emerge from the body of work available at this time and a miscellany of exemplars is noted here. Prevalence is high The International Coaching Federation (ICF) reported as early as 1998 that, among a sample of 210 coaching clients, ‘by far, most personal coaching is done virtually’ (ICF, 1998, p.2). Some 45% of clients already used email services and far more used telephones, quite apart from other technologies, while only 35% had sessions face-to-face. The authors noted that this contrasted with coaching in corporate environments which they believed to be predominantly provided face-to-face. In a more recent ICF study (with different characteristics, not directly comparable with the earlier work), data from 5415 coaches from 73 countries suggested that, while technologically