Linda Tickle-Degnen has researched rapport for over 30 years and her work provides a fascinating perspective upon the practice known as Intensive Interaction in the UK. Initially conceived of as an approach to help a person with complex needs to develop fundamental communication skills, the parallels between descriptions of Intensive Interaction and the rapport are striking.
For example, for all the practitioners that I have worked with or trained, the technique most commonly associated with Intensive Interaction is behaviour mirroring, as described below in an extract from the Intensive Interaction PDF by Graham Firth accessed on the Leeds and York NHS Foundation Trust website:
“Mirroring some aspect of a person’s posture, movements or behaviour can be socially acknowledging and can develop into dynamic behavioural exchanges e.g. mirroring some aspect of a person’s movements or physical activity; adopting someone’s posture.”
Compare this description with the paragraph below from Linda Tickle-Degnens 2006 chapter Nonverbal Behavior and Its Functions in the Ecosystem of Rapport, which details the qualities of one of the ingredients of rapport, Interpersonal Co-ordination.
“The terms coordination, responsiveness, and accommodation are used interchangeably to refer to a whole class of coordinative patterns that are not mutually exclusive of one another. Three frequently measured coordinative patterns are matching, interactional synchrony, and mimicry. Matching refers to behavioral similarity, often measured as a couple’s shared positioning of arms and legs… Interactional synchrony refers to similarity in the rhythm of behavior and to a measurable enmeshment or interdependence of the timing of movements. Mimicry is a matching of the behavior of one participant, such as foot shaking, by another participant close in time to the original behaviour.”
Note that, even though Tickle-Degnen is writing about rapport as a quality that is inherent in all human interactions, I find that her text could be describing the very same Intensive Interaction technique described by Graham Firth. Not only is there a clear alignment between these two descriptions of interaction techniques, the rapport research also offers genuinely useful practice in the descriptions of the differences between postural mirroring, matching and mimicry.
It is alignments such as these that have led me to conclude that rapport is the central experience of Intensive Interaction such that I now see Intensive Interaction as form of Rapport-Based Communication that is apt for the context of supporting people with learning disabilities complex needs and PMLD.
References
Firth G Intensive Interaction from https://www.leedsandyorkpft.nhs.uk/advice-support/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/02/An-Introduction-to-Intensive-Interaction-2019.pdf [accessed on 14/6/24]
Tickle-Degnen L Nonverbal Behavior and Its Functions in the Ecosystem of Rapport - Excerpt from Manusov, Valerie L., and Miles L. Patterson. The SAGE Handbook of Nonverbal Communication, SAGE Publications, Incorporated, 2006. ◆ 381 ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unh/detail.action?docID=996613.