No description available.

No description available.

The thesis reports a discursive investigation of family therapy talk Using discourse and conversation analysis, family therapy data was transcribed and analysed in order to examine participants' concerns in such a context. Video taped data was used in order that non-verbal communication could be captured. Fundamental issues of disability, accountability and therapy ran through the sessions and participants' constructions and versions of these are considered. Following full consideration of methodological and ethical issues two specific themes are examined: complaints and child abuse. In all four analytical chapters a reported concern for the parents was the presence of professional bodies, with many specific references to social services. In the analysis of the therapy data a number of empirical observations were made from the data (i) In the first section of the thesis I demonstrate how this professional attention is constructed and narrated by the clients examining the ways in which complaints are constructed by the parents. I examine the felicity conditions in place to construct it as a complaint. Secondly I address the ways in which these complaints are received by the therapist in a way that orients to their unhelpful nature within the remit of therapy. (ii) The second analytical aspect of the thesis deals with the reported reasons for the professionals' presence by examining issues of reported risk from, and reported instances of child abuse. It is shown that therapy is the normative business of providing an arena for clients to discuss their troubles, and produces difficulty when this is deviated from. The thesis shows how issues of accountability are managed in therapy and demonstrates how parents manage stake and accountability when child abuse is reported. The analyses from this thesis are of particular interest for both discursive research and disability research as it adds to the growing literature on discourse and therapy and considers the critical approaches that have been forming in disability research. The analysis presented in this thesis demonstrates the benefits of using qualitative techniques with delicate data and contributes to our understanding of arguments surrounding issues like child abuse.

The study explored families' experiences of Mentalization Based Treatment for Families (MBT-F), using a qualitative approach. Five families, five parents and four children, who attended MBT-F at a single Child and Family Service (CFS) were interviewed post-therapy using a semi-structured interview schedule developed for the study. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA; Smith, Jarman and Osborn, 1999), which aims to systematically explore an individual's perception of an event, was used to explore the participants' experience of MBT-F. Rich descriptions of the individual participants' experiences were gained and themes for the parents and the young people were then identified. These highlighted both similarities and differences within and between participants. The findings increased understanding of how families experience MBT-F and therefore made a contribution to the evaluation and further development of the therapy. Clinical implications were discussed and further research suggested.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Systematic reviews have shown that family therapy is effective for a range of disorders (Carr, 2009a,b). However, there are many forms of family therapy and it is unclear which specific forms work best for which conditions. One problem is that reviewers have used inconsistent definitions of the field to guide the selection and exclusion of studies from reports. Furthermore, there seems to be little agreement about how to classify family therapies for comparison, leading to difficulties in establishing a clear evidence-base. The current thesis aimed to address these problems by using a Delphi survey (Linstone & Turoff, 1975), to see whether a panel of senior family therapists could agree on a definition and classification of family therapy by consensus opinion. Twenty-seven international experts on family therapy were initially recruited to complete three, iterative rounds of Delphi questionnaires. The process resulted in a consensus profile of essential, unique and proscribed elements of family therapy. There was agreement that family therapy should incorporate a set of essential (systemic) theories, practices and aspects of therapists’ training. However, there was little consensus over the specific types of practices that should be excluded and only a few unique elements of family therapy were agreed. Two classifications of the field were agreed as useful based on 1) mechanisms of change and 2) the focus of therapy (specific disorders versus relationships). Overall, results suggest that it is possible to employ consensus-building techniques to inform a contemporary definition and classification of family therapy. The use of consensus definitions may produce more informative reviews that contribute to the evidence-base. Future work would need to address how some of the broad concepts, identified by the experts panel, could be operationalised for this purpose.

No description available.

No description available.