The Narratives Which Connect…

The Pilot work

The pilot study consisted of three main elements. The first element was a literature review to discover the purposes and content of Personal and Professional Development work in different family therapy traditions. The next element was study trips²¹ to Cardiff, Barcelona and Dublin family therapy training institutes to meet people in charge of PPD programmes.

In preparation for my project, I interviewed ²²Billy Hardy, Jeff Faris and Brenda Cox, ²³Susana Vega and ²⁴Jim Sheehan, all family therapy trainers at leading Family Therapy training institutes. They accounted for how they ran their PPD programmes as a part of their family therapy education programmes and they gave me inspiration to go on with this research project. They also inspired me to investigate areas that I probably would have left out or included much later in the process. This also helped in developing the semi-structured interview. The last element of the pilot work was a first interview with a family therapist.

As a part of my preparation, I also interviewed one family therapist as part of the pilot work. This first participant helped me adjust the research questions and the interview, and gave me important new ideas for both the content of my research and the procedure. For example, I had planned to start interviewing her about her background and personal life history. However, before I started this topic, she told a story from her professional life in which her personal and private experiences were deeply involved in her clinical decision-making. I discovered that she had prepared for the main topic in the interview. This made me reorganise the semi-structured interviews and from then on I began by asking if they had thought of any specific connections about the relation between their personal and private lives and their clinical practice since they agreed to participate in this research project.

After this first pilot interview, I decided to have the first interview with a participant when the participant had completed the video of a first family therapy session and brought this with them to the interview. I also asked each one to send me an e-mail after the interview with their eventual reflections.

My first participant, Elisabeth²⁵, was initially meant to be a part of my pilot study. However she presented such rich material that I decided to include her as a full participant in my research. Following the pilot interview, we decided to have a second “first” interview and then follow the procedures that are a part of the Grounded Theory design. I have, however, also included the first (pilot) interview as a part of my material for analysis.

The Experience from the First Participant

The first participant was a rather newly educated family therapist. She had been a student in the school of nursing when I was a teacher there, about twenty years ago. I did not know her personally but I remembered her as a very verbal and reflective student. I knew that she was divorced and that she had re-married and had children some years ago. When I called her to request her participation in the research, she agreed without hesitation. I sent her the Information Sheet and made an appointment with her for a first interview. I told her that this was probably a pilot interview but that I might use it as a part of my research if it was complete.

I found this first interview very interesting. Immediately after the interview, she visited one of my colleagues that she knew beforehand. She told my colleague about the interview and my colleague found her reflections after the interview interesting. She encouraged her to go home, write her reflections into an e-mail, and send it to me. She did that, and I realised that these kinds of e-mail reflections should be a part of my data collection method from now on, as they help substantiate and validate the analysis.

Next she was required to make a video of a first family therapy session as soon after the interview as possible. She worked in a psychiatric outpatient clinic and she said that it could take some time before she got a new patient, but she would try. I waited some months before I called her again. She said she had not managed but she would still try. After some more months and after transcribing and analysing the first interview I contacted her to ask for one more interview to test my analytic procedure. We met and we had one more very informative interview, but she still had no video. I decided to go on with theoretical sampling and I used the knowledge I had from my first participant as a background for the next participant.

Recruitment

To be included as a participant in this research project they have to be a Norwegian family therapist. In addition, they had to sign a paper where they accepted that their materials were used in the research project (see Appendix 2).

The recruitment strategy is based on my knowledge of the family therapy field in Norway. I have sought to avoid people with whom I have or have had a personal relationship. This has not been possible all the way, but personal relationships have not disturbed the research in any significant way. I also have used colleagues to help me find possible participants in the sampling process. In looking for variation amongst my participants I have presented a possible “case” for a colleague and he or she has pointed to some therapist who could meet as many of my criteria as possible. I thought between six and ten participants would be appropriate for saturation. I ended up with seven participants.

Participants

Of my seven participants, four of my participants have been included as full case studies. The four case studies have been treated as paradigm cases, complementary to the Grounded Theory analysis. That means that I have had two interviews (three interviews with Elisabeth because she was originally meant to be a part of my pilot study), one video from each one of them and e-mail reflections from most of them. All interviews have been transcribed, and analysed using Grounded Theory, and the videos have been analysed using Theme Analysis as described by Dallos and Vetere 2005.

Of the remaining participants, the last three participants have been interviewed once each to cover “parallel connections” between a family therapist’s private and personal life and the client’s life problems. This is a situation where for example, a couple therapist herself is about to divorce when she meets couples that are about to divorce. All together my material from my seven participants consists of 12 interviews and four videos. In addition, I have Grounded Theory memos and e-mail reflections from participants that are connected to the interviews.

Details of participants

My participants consist of two psychologists, three nurses and two social workers that all have family therapy training. There are two men and five women. When I interviewed them they worked in adult psychiatry, in child- and adolescent psychiatry, Family Counselling Offices and in private practice. Everybody, except one family therapist that was asked to participate in this research project, said “yes” to participate and to contribute to my research. I interviewed them in order of appearance:

Name and profession^26	Workplace	Experience as family therapists
1. Elisabeth f. (46), nurse	Family Counselling Office/ Family unit, psychiatry/private practice	10 years
2. Erik m. (62), psychologist	Child- and adolescence psychiatry /Family Counselling Office	33 years
3. Adam m. (45), nurse	Child- and adolescence psychiatry and private practice	18 years
4. Karen f. (62), social worker	Child- and adolescence psychiatry/ Family Counselling Office	33 years
5. Evelyn f. (57), psychologist	Family Counselling Office/ Child- and adolescence psychiatry/ private practice (parallel connections)	24 years
6. Anne f. (50), social worker	Family Counselling Office (parallel connections)	6 years
7. Janne f. (52), nurse	Child- and adolescence psychiatry (parallel connections)	8 years

Table 3. Participants