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Chapter Three – Research methods and their use - Page 91
as agreed, and after the semester was over, I began eventually to study the tape-
recordings. Although I subsequently obtained permission from the AUT Ethics
Committee to collect more data from participants by interviewing them (see Appendix
One), I chose not to avail myself of that opportunity. Following discussion with both of
my supervisors (undertaken in series of joint meetings) I decided to focus the study on
two tasks, the elaboration of an appropriate methodology, and the application of that
methodology through research methods to the analysis of the data that I had already
collected. I considered, in the light of these supervisory discussions, that I had sufficient
consent from participants and approval from the ethics committee to proceed with these
tasks without seeking further consent or approval, and sufficient data to complete my
project.
I am aware that this last point, that I had sufficient data, is controversial. I wanted to
study my topic in a particular way, one which captured the experience and skill that I
personally can bring to that task. This was not out of a sense of grandiosity, but rather
stemmed from a wish to privilege the development of research based on adapted forms
of reflective practice which can increasingly be incorporated into that practice, not
solely but also not least in order to furnish practice-based evidence. I’m also persuaded
by over thirty years of clinical experience on the limits of a direct and completely
objective approach to accessing the consciousness of others. As discussed in Chapter
Two Part One, this latter point is explored by a number of authors, notably Hollway and
Jefferson (1997) writing on the defended subject, and Ewing (2006) on the limits of the
interview. Personally, I came, as detailed at length in Chapter Two Part Two, to
particularly value the taking of a group-analytic perspective, which values individuals
and their worlds but also values a trans-personal perspective, and in particular,
unconscious aspects of both individual and transpersonal experience. It would be of