Making Research Matter

Researching for change in the theory and practice of counselling and psychotherapy

Stephen Goss, Christine Stevens, Stephen Goss, Christine Stevens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415636629
• eBook ISBN: 9781317430223
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Making Research Matter is an original contribution to the growing field of work-based learning with a focus on research aimed at developing the practice of counselling and psychotherapy addressing the practice-research gap. Stephen Goss, Christine Stevens and their contributors explore the links between research and professional practice and show how this can impact on practice to make a genuine, demonstrable contribution to the development of therapeutic services, good practice and the understanding of psychological and social issues.

The book is divided into two parts. Part one gives an account of the thinking, ethos and development of work-based learning. It explores the importance of the in-depth rigorous and reflexive inquiry skills needed to sustain research project work. Part two presents nine studies of work-based psychotherapy or counselling related research. Each account sets out the focus and motivation of the study and critically discusses how the research design was developed, the choice of methods employed, with an explanation of the outcomes. A vital part of each account is a review of how the research has been used to make changes and developments in the work setting.

Making Research Matter provides insights into the lived experience of the practitioner-researcher, to stimulate the reader to generate their own ideas for research enquiry. It presents a range of proven, successful research projects, and shows how they have made a difference in the development of theory and practice which lead to positive change, better services and more informed practice. It will be an essential resource for psychotherapists, counsellors, social workers, and those involved in coaching and clinical psychology.

Part I

DOI: 10.4324/9781315691473-2

1 Facilitating high achievers to tell their stories of professional entrepreneurialism

Lessons from the doctorate in psychotherapy by professional studies

Simon du Plock and Paul Barber

DOI: 10.4324/9781315691473-3

Opening summary

The Doctorate in Psychotherapy by Professional Studies (DPsych), a Middlesex University and Metanoia Institute joint programme, was launched in 1998 in response to demand from senior and accomplished practitioners in the fields of psychotherapy, counselling and psychology for a route to a doctoral qualification based on research into aspects of their own contributions to therapeutic theory and practice. The therapy professions are by nature complex, insecure, constantly changing, and they have, until recently, provided little formal post-doctoral structure or coherent Continuing Professional Development (CPD). The number and quality of applications to the programme, from its inception, evidenced a felt need among established professionals for the opportunity to engage in research and development via projects grounded in work-based learning. Candidates have, throughout the life of the programme to date, strongly resonated with its ethos to revitalise and nourish fully qualified mid-career professionals.

We will describe how the programme team has developed the existing Middlesex DProf model of a professional work-based doctorate to enable qualified and experienced practitioners to design and undertake a project which focuses on a topic of direct relevance to their own professional and/or clinical work and which has the potential to make an innovative contribution to their field. A key characteristic of the programme is the extent to which candidates are required to assess their personal and professional journey prior to engagement with the doctorate, and the degree to which this assessment enables candidates to identify how they will use the programme as a vehicle to translate existing interests and concerns into a viable research journey.

Academic advisors have been struck by misconceptions (from a professional doctorate perspective) of academic value. Since candidates entering the programme frequently hold relatively restrictive and conventional views of what constitutes an original contribution to knowledge, it has been important to find ways to encourage them to ‘re-story’ and re-evaluate their achievements. All demonstrate skills and outlooks characteristic to some degree of the entrepreneur and are thus generally quite advanced in the entrepreneurial life cycle (Leadbeater, 1997). The programme team has found it helpful to draw on disciplines including work-based learning and industrial sociology, alongside psychotherapy (including narrative therapy), to enable candidates to understand, organise and present a full picture of their achievements to date. We will draw on ‘case’ material to illustrate how the team has found methods of synthesizing these different ways of conceptualizing ‘achievement’ congruent with the ‘therapeutic entrepreneur’ status of doctoral candidates. We will also suggest implications of their experience for our understanding of ‘achievement’ in the context of work-based learning.

We are mindful in reporting on the development of the DPsych by Professional Studies of the ethical responsibilities of ‘insider researchers’ – researchers who undertake research in their own organizations (Costley and Gibbs, 2006). Accordingly, we have decided to present brief and anonymised illustrations of issues and dilemmas experienced by candidates. These illustrations are intended to be indicative of general themes.

The pedagogical context

The DPsych was first validated in 1998 as a joint programme offered by Metanoia Institute and Middlesex University through the National Centre for Work Based Learning Partnerships, now the Institute of Work Based Learning (IWBL). Over the past decade, the programme has flourished and currently has in excess of 120 graduates who have made considerable contributions to practice in psychotherapy and related fields. The programme team has been successful in developing a scholarly community within which these graduates and the candidate body (currently comprising approximately 100 researchers) are able to network and disseminate their work. Applicants to the programme are well-established accredited and experienced psychotherapists, counsellors and psychologists, and generally hold senior positions in the therapy world.

While it might initially seem surprising that individuals were (and are) able to reach such key positions without a doctorate, it should be remembered that psychotherapy, counselling and even psychology, like other ‘helping professions’, have only recently obtained professional status. The professional field from whence our candidates are drawn is by nature complex, insecure, constantly changing and, until recently, provided little formal post-doctoral structure or coherent CPD. Consequently, the routes individuals have taken through the kaleidoscope of available trainings and professional validations have been idiosyncratic. Conversely, the relative lack of uniform structures have, paradoxically, provided opportunities for resourceful practitioners to achieve positions (both by acquiring them and creating them) that would not have been possible in a more formally regulated environment. How the introduction of the Health Professions Council and increasing emphasis on evidence-based practice will impact on this situation remains to be seen.

The ethos of the doctorate by professional studies

The philosophy at the heart of the DPsych is the belief that professional practitioners should seek continuously to update and expand their application of theory, to evaluate their own practice and to critique their assumptions with particular attention to current developments and research outcomes in the field. This work is not undertaken in isolation (as it is typically in most traditional PhDs), but in regular collaboration with other interested parties. Candidates are required to produce a ‘Final Product’ – essentially a research and development enterprise as opposed to a research-based thesis. Impact with and upon the therapeutic community is an essential aspect of this approach as is practice-based evidence in research. Successful candidates are expected to evidence:

1. Professional experience developed continuously through active and effective engagement with individuals and groups of clients in a wide range of contexts.
2. Forms of research resulting in ‘products’ of demonstrable interest and usefulness to practitioners.
3. Leadership qualities and skills whereby professionals are able to set up training, consultancy and organisations dedicated to psychotherapy provision.

This focus promotes an ethos of research needing to be useful and active in the world, making a difference and positively influencing the systems in which we work and live. In this context, doctoral research doubles as change agency.

To this end, the DPsych is designed not only to support candidates on a research journey which enables them to gain a D-level qualification, but through interaction with the programme team, it fosters a personal and professional development journey that enables practitioners to situate themselves at the centre of their professional work to date, to actively co-design their doctoral route and to identify themselves as ‘practitioners of excellence’. The team defines practitioner excellence as attending one who strives constantly to update and expand application of theory to practice, critiques their own assumptions with particular attention to current developments in the field and makes useful contributions to practice and knowledge.

Programme publicity emphasises its aims to nurture the mid-career professional. Many applicants are attracted by this ethos, and many graduates report that while they valued obtaining a doctorate, they were particularly glad to do so in an environment that promoted personal and professional development.

Candidates are launched into this developmental work by undertaking a formal Review of Personal and Professional Learning (RPPL), in which they review and critically reflect on the links between their past experiences, current position and future intentions on their doctoral journey. Such a reflection and the sense of agency that candidates obtain, parallels a therapeutic process in which clients may reflect and re-story. Explicit in this process is an understanding of the ‘excellent practitioner’ as a professional ‘mover and shaker’ in their field.

Our experience is that in the course of their journey through the DPsych, candidates increasingly re-story themselves as professionals who can, and via their Final Products actually do, make a difference to the way psychological therapies are conceived and delivered.

Professional entrepreneurialism

It quickly became apparent to us that those therapists who approached us interested in becoming candidates on the Doctorate in Psychotherapy by Professional Studies were, though quite distinct in many ways, nevertheless united by their entrepreneurialism. This entrepreneurialism was, moreover, of a particular type which we came to conceptualise as ‘professional entrepreneurialism’. Entrepreneurialism per se is not a concept much met with in the psychotherapy literature. In its most frequent usage, it seems to denote profit-driven individualism – a far cry from attending to the psychological needs of our fellow human beings. Notions of ‘social entrepreneurship’ which have emerged recently in the United States and Britain appear less individualistic: ‘Entrepreneurship is the process of doing something new for the purpose of creating wealth for the individual and adding value to society’ (Kao, 1993, p. 69).

Kelly (1993), an American writer, uses the term social entrepreneurship to describe ‘conventional’ businesses that incorporate ‘social’ or ‘ethical’ aims into their mission and objectives. Roper and Cheney (2005) provide a useful critical perspective on the term.

Leadbeater (1997), perhaps the most influential UK author in this field, conceptualises social entrepreneurs as:

Entrepreneurial: they take under-utilized, discarded resources and spot ways of using them to satisfy unmet needs.

Innovative: they create new services and products, new ways of dealing with problems, often by bringing together approaches that have traditionally been kept separate.

Transformatory: they transform the institutions they are in charge of…. Most importantly, they can transform the neighbourhoods and communities they serve by opening up possibilities for self-development.

(p. 53)

It was immediately obvious to the programme team that the prior experience of most successful applicants included completed projects which evidenced their ability to be entrepreneurial, innovative and transformatory in Leadbeater’s terms. Their projects mobilised often discarded resources – both human and physical – to engage with intractable social problems. They were both entrepreneurial and innovative in identifying and satisfying unmet needs. Our awareness of this characteristic of applicants may have been assisted by the fact that the culture of the Metanoia Institute itself is one of entrepreneurship, given the founding and early development of the Institute by a small group of charismatic, innovative leaders. Add to this the gentle humanistic approach of the programme’s culture, which is person and process centred, values authenticity and personal experience and venerates experiential research and learning, and we begin to appreciate the wider field in which the doctorate unfolds.

Leadbeater (1997) proposes an entrepreneurial life cycle which is particularly relevant for making sense of the needs and aspirations of our candidates:

Successful social entrepreneurs create a cycle of development that goes through several stages. Social entrepreneurs start with an endowment of social capital in the form of a network of contacts and supporters. This gives them access to physical and financial capital, which they can use to develop the organization. The next step is the recruitment of further key people (human capital) to allow the organization to expand. If this phase is successful the organization can enjoy strong growth with the creation of a string of new products and services as well as an infrastructure of buildings. This infrastructure becomes the social dividend of the process and the basis for a further phase of investment.

(p. 51)

Our applicants are often relatively advanced in this entrepreneurial life cycle – indeed some had gone round it several times in the pursuit of successive therapy projects. A crucial difference between them and Leadbeater’s social entrepreneurs, however, was that they did not consciously identify themselves as entrepreneurs. Two further differences seemed significant: they identified as both professional therapists and organizational leaders and they were more concerned about social change than personal wealth. It seemed to us that this group could accurately be described as morally led ‘professional entrepreneurs’, since essentially, they were acting as entrepreneurs within the caring community of therapy professions.

Developing professional and intellectual capital

The distinctive characteristic of the DPsych – the development of specific products – can be usefully conceptualised as a form of ‘professional entrepreneurialism’ which increases the intellectual and practice ‘currency’ of both the individual candidate and the therapy professions. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in his seminal 1986 paper ‘The Forms of Capital’, expands the notion of capital beyond its usual economic understanding, arguing that Bourdieu goes on to distinguish three forms of capital:

… capital can present itself in three fundamental guises: as economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the forms of property rights; as cultural capital, which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of educational qualifications; and as social capital, made up of social obligations (‘connections’), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of a title of nobility.

(p. 242, original emphasis)

It is… impossible to account for the str...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• Index