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Group Analytic Ethnography
Chapter Two Part Two – Methodology - Page 67
Examination of the work of researchers in areas related to my own, I found much of this
informative but variously differing in emphasis. Hunt’s (1989) pioneering work was
cast as psychoanalytic fieldwork. Writers such as Walkerdine and colleagues
(Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody, 2002), Hollway and Jefferson (Hollway and Jefferson,
1997, 2000), and Clarke (Clarke, 2002), are concerned with much of the same ground as
myself. However, many of these identify as academic social psychologists or
sociologists, and although some have significant interest and some training in clinical
work, as researchers many collectively eschew the role of clinician. In Cartwright’s
work (2002) on the development of the psychoanalytic research interview, he elaborates
why the psychoanalytic approach has a huge untapped research potential, having had an
almost exclusive and very limited focus on clinical single cases. He also captures
something of the extent of scrutiny and reflection that goes on in routine clinical
practice. However, he takes a different turning when his response is to set out to
develop in the standardized research interview something that is decidedly separate
from clinical research work, and which therefore heads towards a post-positivist
paradigm strongly influenced by demands for reliability and validation.
It slowly dawned on me that what I have come to be doing in my own research is group
analytic ethnography. That is, if I look at how I characteristically proceed, I am
analysing the process of a group or groups, and the way that I do this is as one would
analyse a group-analytic group (Foulkes, 1964). In a sense, this is using a form of
clinical group-analytic method with what Foulkes called a Functional or Work Group as
opposed to a Group-Analytic Group or a Life Group, and naturally this requires
modifications to be made to that clinical method.