The Institute for Culture and Society signature an agreement with the Government of Navarra and DIRIME to research communication patterns in family mediation processes.

To improve family and couple mediation processes through the study of discursive practices present in mediation processes. This is the goal of the agreement signed by the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra with the department of Social Rights, Social Economics and employment of the Government of Navarra and DIRIME, a mediation service offered by the Subdirection of Childhood, Adolescence and Family of the Navarra Agency for the Autonomy and development of People (ANADP), an autonomous organization dependent on the department.

The agreement enables the recording of different family mediation sessions for subsequent analysis by the researcher team. The study will explore the pragmatic-discursive strategies of all parties involved in the process, as well as their effectiveness, scope and limitations.

Linguist Inés Olza, principal investigator of the ICS group 'Links, creativity and culture', explains that they are going to analyze these processes "from an interactional linguistic perspective": "First and foremost, what happens in mediation sessions is a regulated, measured and facilitated dialogue. And from linguistics there is a whole set of study tools that help to rigorously understand how face-to-face interaction works. That is our central point. In this sense, he stresses that the alliance will make it possible to "analyze whether in these processes there is a reasonable increase in cooperation between the parties and what linguistic indicators show this".

The mediator Pilar Peña, founder of DIRIME together with Marian Aniz, points out that this study will allow them to "broaden their tools to approach mediation processes": "All research is an advance and this one will allow us to have a better knowledge of the language used in mediation, which will make it possible to improve communication". They also value the opportunity to work in the theoretical-practical field in a "professional, fast and very cohesive" way.

As a result of this work, scientific-technical reports will be prepared regularly with the results, which will be evaluated in joint work sessions of the ICS and DIRIME teams, in order to establish improvement issues and favor the monitoring of these processes. This is a pioneering form of work , since, in interactional linguistics research , there are very few opportunities to have access to this subject of real case recordings.

The recordings will be made with the express consent of the participants in the processes, strictly safeguarding the confidentiality of their staff information. The agreement is framed within the development the research projectsInMedio ("Towards an interdisciplinary theory of mediation. New scenarios and tools for the study of the discursive construction of social bonds") and MultiDeMe ("From disagreement to mediation: detection and analysis of multimodal patterns in spontaneous interaction and institutionalized mediation practices"), the latter financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and FEDER/EU funds (PID2022-143052NB-I00). It also has the scientific support of the CoCoMInt Thematicnetwork ("Conflictive communication and mediation: interaction, relational links and social cohesion"), also funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and the State research Agency (ref. RED2022-134123-T).