British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy puts a great emphasis on counselling research in counselling training: students need to be informed of the developments in counselling research, they should understand how counselling research helps the counselling practice and finally, they should engage, at their own level, in counselling research.
Unfortunately, recently, there seems to be a backlash against counselling research in counselling training: it is all but eliminated from many course curricula (or retained only in name - to meet the accrediting body's requirements). This is done in the name of occupational training, but in fact, in most cases a very simple consideration is the key factor: counselling research is a time consuming and often frustrating activity for both tutors and students. The use of temporary tutors and the pressure of maintaining student numbers and keeping students 'happy' (irrespective of the academic responsibility of the institutions) make the inclusion of a systematic research project impractical for the training institutions, which, in turn, put pressures on the accrediting bodies to change the expectations.
This is a sad development, especially as counselling training has a great advantage compared to many other disciplines: an excellent textbook on doing counselling research.
Doing research in any field is a complicated affair for students - there are many factors to be accounted for and untried skills to be deployed. McLeod's book is a textbook that aims at helping students to structure their counselling research and avoid the most obvious pitfalls.
It is really a research strategy textbook with a strong emphasis on methodological issues. As epistemological issues, due to the strong positivist bias in counselling research (at least traditionally - partly as a reaction to the approach of psychotherapy), are not usually discussed in this discipline, it is a valuable addition for the reader that McLeod’s book deals with some epistemological issues and even if not quite systematically, and also discusses research strategy and methodological issues in an epistemological context. Having said that, in his evaluation of various research techniques, there is a vague, implicit acceptance of the positivist paradigm of the cognition process.
Let us start with the chapter on literature survey. This, as McLeod argues, is a key issue, and an issue that requires skills that come from practice, thus students likely to have a shortage in it. The chapter gives an almost step-by-step guidance to students how to develop a literature review and includes important information to students where to start collecting the relevant articles and data. While McLeod rightly argues for a critical engagement with the existing literature, in my view, this part is somewhat insufficiently developed. It probably derives from the above-mentioned positivist influence in counselling research, and hence he does not deal with issues such as deconstructing the literature (in terms of philosophical standpoint, theoretical approach and its consequences, the relationship between theory and method, etc.). Interestingly, considering how large proportion of the book deals with methodological issues, the problem of selecting literature for the review is not mentioned - this is a problem as, after all, the literature review is a survey, thus the standard principles of sampling should apply.
The research process chapter deals with the key issues of designing a counselling research project and a good research proposal. This is the part that many students with no or little background in research should really carefully read. It explains the definition of research questions and the construction of hypotheses - probably the weakest point of many beginners' research proposal. From this chapter students will understand that it is unlikely (even if they position their research in the framework of grounded theory) to find anything meaningful to report from a research project if prior to the beginning of the empirical study, the student has not identified expectations, hypotheses.
The following two chapters deal with quantitative and qualitative research respectively and discuss the key research techniques associated with these (although in my view it is possible to use surveys for qualitative studies and interviews for quantitative studies). Interestingly, again probably because of the positivist paradigm, validity issues (apart from bad design in quantitative studies) are discussed only in relationship with qualitative research. While this is done thoroughly and enhances the awareness of the students who want to carry out such a research project, in my view validity issues exist in quantitative issues too and mainly because of epistemological reasons. At the extreme, positivist approaches cannot recognise causal relationships (as each observation is distinct and unrelated to others) and, partly as a result of this, generalisation is highly problematic as the potential number of all possible observations is infinite (thus the problem emerges between the definite sample and infinite population).
While the book deals with issues around processing the data, it does it rather shortly, probably because of the emphasis on the research strategy. While the use of statistical techniques are certainly outside of the scope of this book, I would have liked to see a more thorough discussion about coding qualitative (and to some extent quantitative) fieldwork data.
McLeod's discussion of the case study method is an outstanding chapter in this book. It goes thoroughly the problem of case study method in counselling research, the context in which it is carried out, the way in which validity problems could and should be addressed. It will certainly enlighten the students of the principles of case study (and make them recognise that the 'research' they thought was case study is in fact merely an interview). Hopefully, the well-developed, strongly defined 18 pages would encourage more students to apply this method if their research question allows it.
Most counselling research that students carry out have a title that reads something like this: 'How does counselling help in...', or 'Can counselling help in...' or 'Effectiveness of counselling in...'. Probably because of this, but also because it is a key issue in counselling and for insurance companies and employers, two chapters of the book deal with these questions. In my view, students who want to develop a research project that deals with the effectiveness or the usefulness of counselling, should start with reading these two chapters. It can save students from disappointment and frustration and also of the rejection of their research proposal and research report by their supervisor or course tutor.
Finally, the book briefly but sufficiently deals with ethical issues.
All in all, this book greatly benefits counselling training and research.
© Dolores James
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