Agenda-Setting with College Students

Agenda-setting (discussed in MI course 2) is a particular challenge with adolescents. Because of their shorter time horizon for making decisions (e.g., thinking 3 months into the future rather than 3 years) and incomplete cognitive development (especially frontal-lobe functions like logic and reason), adolescents and even young adults can be harder to enlist into the treatment goals that providers typically suggest. For example, a 19-year-old man may not care much about managing his weight to reduce future diabetes risk, but he might care a lot about appearing more attractive to young women. You can work with a client on behavior change even if their reasons for a particular behavior are not quite the same as yours. All that is needed is agreement on what to do, without necessarily agreeing on why.

For each of these examples, try to answer the following three questions:

What is your agenda in this consultation?

What might be this client’s agenda? What questions could you ask to find out?

How might you link the two or negotiate a shared agenda?