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Chapter Twelve – Implications for Theory, Practice and Research – Page 334
analytically informed models. For example, it remains for someone to carry out a study
of focus groups and focus-group methodology from this perspective. This would lead to
a more group-analytic theorisation of the conduct of focus groups, and of the use of
focus groups as a research methodology, and to a wealth of research that could ensue
from these steps.
Fourth, I referred in Chapter Ten to the importance of practice-based evidence as part of
the same cycle of consideration and action that includes evidence-based practice, which
can then be thought of as Practice-Based-Evidence-Based Practice, or PBEBP. This
point is crucial. In the field of the psychological therapies, managerial and economic
pressures have combined with the self-interest of some professional groups, and have
created a situation where some approaches that lend themselves particularly well to
certain forms of evaluation have acquired a dominance not warranted by the evidence
for their efficacy. What is needed is the construction of a strategy as described by Mace
(2006), which requires that clinical research is focussed on approaches that have
demonstrated promise as measured by clinician or patient report, and that all of the
consequences of the introduction of evidence-based practice (both positive and
negative) are taken into account in the evaluation of that practice. The closeness of the
research approach in this study to usual practice, and the profound strength of the
approach that is its consideration of context (and hence of the range of consequences of
practices) leave it very well placed to contribute to the filling-out of the evidential cycle
in the developing construction of truly evidence-based approaches to a range of
professional work.
Finally, leading on from this last point, it remains to set the record straight in the clinical
research literature, where psychoanalytic, group-analytic and indeed ethnographic ways