The Narratives Which Connect…

3. Design of the Study

Introduction

Many elements combine to form a family therapist. The therapist’s professional background may comprise being for example, a health- and social worker, or the type of clinical family therapy education taken, or supervision and the master therapist that leads the way for the student. In this research, we will not take many of these aspects into account. The focus will be on the patterns that connect the family therapist’s private and personal background with her or his family therapy practice.

In this chapter, I will first restate the aims of my research and my research questions. Then the design of my research project will be presented with sampling procedures and data analysis procedures. I will give the background for my choice of qualitative research method and reasons for my choice of methods. I will give a presentation of the entire research process and finally I will present the procedure, the research flow chart, recruitment and the process of semi-structured research interviewing.

I have chosen to use two main qualitative research methods that are part of an approach to interpretative theme analysis. My reasons for choosing interpretative theme analyses are connected to my aim to “understand and represent the participants’ point of view” (Dallos and Vetere, 2005, p. 53). I also assume that these points of view are relatively stable over time and I want to know which kind of processes move these points of view and what happens when they change.

This is a Grounded Theory research project that uses both semi-structured interviews and video analysis.²⁰ Theoretical Sampling is an integrated part of Grounded Theory and formed my participant selection process. In this research, I also use Theme Analysis. The videos were analysed using Theme Analysis. Finally, I will say a few words about how this material is analysed and present an overview of my material.

The pilot work of visiting family therapy institutes and discussing their PPD programmes helped me shape the research question and develop the semi-structured interview.

Research aims

The title of this research project is:

The Narratives Which Connect: Looking for narratives that connect therapist’s personal and private lives with their clinical practice.

I have formulated these research aims for this project:

1. 
   To develop an understanding of the lack of knowledge and interest in the field of psychotherapy research for the links between the psychotherapists own personal and private life and her/his clinical practice.
   
2. 
   To develop new knowledge and theories to help expand an under-theorized area of family therapy training and clinical practice.
   
3. 
   To explore how personal and private experiences can influence family therapy practice.
   
4. 
   To explore how family therapy practice can influence personal and private life.
   
5. 
   To explore how sequences of personal and clinical practice can be understood as one meaningful episode.
   
6. 
   To explore implications of what consequences the integration of personal and professional development could have for family therapy practice.
   
7. 
   To discuss what ethical standards should be considered when practicing systemic family therapy.
   

With this as the point of departure for my research, it is necessary to formulate some research questions to more clearly establish within which frames the research should be located.

Research Questions

1. 
   How do we understand that so little research has been done on the links between the psychotherapist’s own personal and private life and her/his clinical practice?
   
2. 
   How does the therapist's own life history and personal and private experiences influence the way she/he understands and practises systemic family therapy?
   
3. 
   What are the influences of being a systemic family therapist on the therapist's own life and how she/he thinks about the way she/he lives it?
   
4. 
   How will the researcher and the research process influence the participant and vice versa and create meaning for the relationship between his or her personal life and clinical practice?
   

Qualitative Study and Grounded Theory

I have utilized a qualitative research approach in this project. I have decided to use a qualitative research approach, since the research will be concerned primarily with processes rather than outcomes or products (Creswell, 1994). Additionally, a qualitative research approach permits the exploration of processes by which people construct opinions when a limited number of participants are involved. By basing my research on a qualitative method, the process is inductive. As a researcher, I play an important role as an instrument for this process to work successfully (Creswell, 1994). Aspects of self-reflectivity are captured through my use of a research diary, research supervision, and Grounded Theory memo writing.

I have used Grounded Theory as the framework for this research. Charmaz divides Grounded Theory into two main schools. One school she denominates as Objectivist Grounded Theory and the other as Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2006). In objectivist grounded theory, the data are removed from the social context from which they emerge. “An objectivist grounded theorist assumes that data represent objective facts” (p. 131).

Constructivist grounded theory “…places priority on the phenomena of study and sees both data and analysis as created from shared experiences and relationships with participants and other sources of data” (p. 130). One important consequence of this point of view is that any analysis is “…contextually situated in time, place, culture, and situation” (p. 131). This means that any research is a co-creation that emerges as part of a process in which everyone involved is seen as a participant and where the observer position becomes impossible. It will not be possible to take a stand outside what is studied. From this point of view, we are all participants. I agree with Charmaz when she claims: “I view grounded theory methods as a set of principles and practices, not as prescriptions or packages” (p. 9). In my research, I have chosen the constructivist grounded theory position.

Grounded Theory

The Grounded Theory method of study is essentially based on three main elements: 1. concepts; 2. categories; and 3. propositions. Concepts are the major elements of analysis. “A concept is a labelled phenomenon. It is an abstract representation of an event, object, or action/interaction that a researcher identifies as being significant in the data” (Strauss and Corbin, 1998, p. 103). Theory is developed from the conceptualisation of data, from the specific elements in the research material.

“The grounded theorist undertakes close and systematic exploration of the data, generating, as she goes, an array of categories and theoretical propositions intimately linked, in demonstrable ways, to the body of data. The overall aim is to produce some theory, grounded in the data and linked to the relevant literature, which illuminates an under-researched domain” (Wren, 2000, p. 96).

Theory gains meaning by being grounded in “…good, powerful, convincing examples.” This is the basis for grounded theory (Dallos and Vetere, 2005, p. 53) and this is the aim of my research. Grounded theory focuses on understanding how people make meaning of their experiences (Charmaz, 2000). In grounded theory research, context is rooted in the phenomena that are being studied, and therefore an individual or therapist’s process of meaning-making cannot be understood outside of the context in which it occurs (Ward, 2005). Charmaz (2000 and 2006) calls this type of grounded theory “constructivist grounded theory.”

The Rationale for Grounded Theory

Research methods tend to start with theory and derive data from the theory. Grounded Theory is a research method in which the theory is developed from the data. That makes this an inductive approach, meaning that it moves from the specific to the more general rather than the other way around.

I will explore the data and looked for meaningful links between therapists’ personal and private lives and their clinical practice. It is therefore the trustworthiness of my examples that creates the meaning of this research. According to Grounded Theory, these considerations should be taken into account:

1. 
   A site or group must be chosen
   
2. 
   A decision must be made about the types of data to be used.
   
3. 
   Another consideration is how long an area should be studied.
   
4. 
   Initially, the number of sites or interviews depends on access, research goals and time.
   

I decided to interview Norwegian family therapists of different ages, genders, experiences and numbers of years as a therapist. My data emerge from transcribed interviews, videos, genograms, e-mail reflections and Grounded Theory memos. The area was studied until the analysis reached saturation.

Once these decisions were made, I developed a first list of semi-structured interview questions and areas of observation. This list was based on the relevant clinical literature and research and my own experiences as a family therapist and family therapy supervisor and on my pilot interviews with family therapy trainers that did PPD-work. They are not only questions from “the real world,” but they are also questions that changed during the research process. These questions were provisional at first and either discarded or developed as new questions developed and took new directions when data were analysed.

In this process, I used Theoretical Sampling as a tool to guide me through the selection of participants. Theoretical Sampling was the method that I used to choose new participants. That meant that I had to do much Grounded Theory analytic work during my sampling process. Each subsequent participant was chosen based on the material I had sampled and analysed from the previous participants, and how this analysis had developed the emergent theoretical ideas.