The primary objective of this study was to explore perceptions of UK school counsellors of confidentiality and information sharing in therapeutic work with children and young people, using qualitative methods. The research design employed a two-stage process, using questionnaires and follow-up interviews, with a small, non-random sample of school…

Counselling culturally diverse populations poses several challenges for mental health professionals in schools as well as the wider community. In 1998, the author interviewed counsellors working in Israeli schools, and categorised their approaches to immigrant pupils in four broad categories: culturally encapsulated assimilator, self-facilitator,…

"Art-Based Research" (McNiff, 1998a) introduced the idea of using artistic expressions by researchers as ways of knowing and methods of inquiry as distinguished from approaching art made by subjects as data which are interpreted by discursive methods, a practice that has been widely used in various disciplines studying human behaviour.…

This paper challenges the neglect of psychotherapeutic methods in therapy research and discusses the use of methods arising directly from therapy practice to generate research data. Recent developments in therapy research culture are critiqued in order to contextualise the present contribution. The research design and methodology evolve from the…

We report in this article on the second phase of an in-depth project examining practitioners' use of a narrative model for 1-1 career guidance interviews in England, derived from the work of Mark Savickas. Using biographical narrative interviews, we explored the impact and constraints experienced by eight practitioner participants when engaging…

My experience of people's life stories from my work as a narrative therapist consistently destabilised distinctions between imagined/magical and real experiences. I came to realise that the day-to-day magical realist juxtapositions I came upon were encounters with people's daily lives, as lived, that have remained unacknowledged within the…

In our research and educational practice we sometimes use songwriting as an alternative way to acquire and communicate insights about the social world. While this approach differs markedly from scientific ways of knowing, it offers valuable and perhaps unique opportunities, in keeping with turns towards narrative/performative methodologies in…

In this article we aim to explore those points at which migrant identity and landscape intersect. We also consider implications for holistic models of counselling with migrant groups. The New Zealand migration literature was the starting point to consider how and why the experience of migration has been studied. We asked how collective biography…

Examining the extent to which the lived, embodied experience can be worded, a study integrating artistic research methodologies of narrating and perceptual practices was designed. The combined use of writing and moving showed the importance of non-languaged ways of knowing, building on the idea of an embodied cognition and the embodied mind, as…

Ethical approaches to practice and research in counselling and arts/psychotherapies demand an urgent attention to body politics. Bodies are not neutral; gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class are socio-political aspects that shape our mental, emotional and physical selves and inform our ethical values. Drawing from the author's embodied practice…

Psychotherapy for clients with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is different to therapy with most clients because these clients are multiple, comprising one or more host, and one or more alter personalities. The necessary components to be addressed in order that clients can live successfully either as a multiple or as an integrated person are…

The aims of this study were to investigate the level of adversarial growth among telephone counsellors, and to examine the influence of psychological and environmental factors on growth. In particular, the effect of compassion fatigue, empathy, environmental support and calls per shift on posttraumatic growth was assessed. Sixty-four telephone…

The present study focuses on the effectiveness of interactions with callers to a helpline as perceived by the helpline volunteers. Applying a qualitative methodology, we analysed 12 descriptions of what the volunteers considered to be the most helpful calls they could reconstruct from memory, and the factors they attributed to the successful…

This paper presents findings from 11 in-depth interviews with Turkish undergraduate students, who were, by the time of data collection, about to spend a semester at a European university under the Erasmus exchange scheme. The students all agreed to be interviewed about their feelings about studying in a foreign culture, and were found to be…

This article is based on a brief evaluation carried out on behalf of the relationship counselling service, Relate, regarding the delivery of a pilot specialist counselling service for adult male prisoners at HMP Ford, a low security "category D" prison in the South East of England. At the heart of the research lies a focus on the perceptions of…