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Finally, I believe that intermediate level psychotherapy students are particularly valuable
research collaborators in view of their skills and experience, their investment in the process of
training, and their core task of developing reflexive and informed practice.
Appel, S.W.D. (1999) Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy, Westport, Connecticut and London:
Bergin and Garvey.
Farrell, W.B.F. (1996) Training and Professional Development in the Field of Counselling
Psychology. In R. Woolfe & W. Dryden (Eds.), Handbook of Counselling Psychology. London:
Sage.
C.4 Procedure:
a) State the approach taken to obtaining information and/or testing the hypothesis.
b) State in practical terms what research procedures will be used, and how information will be
gathered and processed.
c) State how your data will be analysed.
NB WHERE THE RESEARCH INVOLVES POTENTIALLY HAZARDOUS SUBSTANCES, E.G. RADIOACTIVE
MATERIALS, REFER TO SECTION 6.5 OF THE GUIDELINES.
a) The approach taken is based on Grounded Theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Rennie et al,
1988). Working within the University of Chicago school of symbolic interactionism, Glaser and
Strauss systematised a method of developing a theory that is "grounded" in the phenomenon
under investigation. This approach emphasises the theory-generative phase as opposed to the
theory-verificational (or hypothesis-testing) phase of induction.
b) Data already collected are the audio-tape recordings of 14 two-hour weekly sessions of a
specialised learning group. Complete or partial transcripts of these sessions will be analysed
using qualitative data analysis software (N Vivo version 2.0), as described in c) below.
Following an analysis of this first set of data, a series of individual interviews will be
conducted with participants, subject to their continuing consent (see form). These interviews
will be recorded on audio-tape, and transcribed. This second set of data will in turn be analysed
to yield further discoveries. The first set of data consists of recordings of participants working
together as a group, with the aim of developing the capacity of students to integrate theory and
practice in their clinical work, and therefore includes some 'reflection-in-action' (Schön, 1983)
as part of this task. The second set of interviews will represent a more explicit and individual
process of reflection on professional and personal development.
c) Analysis of the data will consist of breaking transcripts into elements. Following Rennie et al
(1988), these are passages of the transcript that stand out as conveying a main concept. Closer
consideration of the element usually leads to the judgement that it contains other meanings as
well. There is no standard in determining the length of an element, which may vary from a line
or two to more than half a page of text. All elements will be compared and conceptualised in
terms of commonalities. Each datum is placed in as many categories as possible to preserve the
conceptual richness of the phenomenon. Throughout the analysis, the analyst's hunches and
theoretical ideas are recorded as memoranda that are kept separate from the documents on
which the categories are recorded. This recording of guiding assumptions is intended to reduce
drift away from the grounding of categories in the data. As the conceptual structure develops,
new data sources are selected that promise to illuminate the nature of the structure. Eventually,
the new data add little to the development of new descriptive categories, at which point the
categories are "saturated". The analyst increasingly draws upon the theoretical memoranda and
begins to conceptualise more abstract categories that subsume the descriptive categories, yet are
grounded in them. If possible, a core category is conceptualised that subsumes all other
descriptive and conceptual categories. At this point, the conceptual structure is usually
hierarchical, with lower-order conceptual categories serving as the properties of the core
category, and descriptive categories serving as properties of the lower-order conceptual
categories. The final product is an elaboration of this conceptual structure of categories,
including the relationship among them, and the relationships among the categories and the data.
Ref No # 6 of 16