This research study has explored the kinds of thoughts that therapists report having had in response to their experiences with therapy failures. The central goal was to develop a model for organizing therapists' thoughts to form a basis for further investigations into therapists' conceptual processes for coping with and learning from therapy failures. The methodological approaches used in this study were designed to conform to a set of hermeneutic and social constructionist assumptions about the development and function of "meaning making," as it applies to both psychological research and the therapeutic relationship. Thus, the research methods replicated a social construction process, using a "community" of participants for all stages of data gathering and analyses. The application of Thought Listing and Multiple Sorting Procedures in combination with Cluster and Multidimensional Scaling Analyses yielded a three dimensional solution with which to organize these therapists' thoughts. Additional findings suggest that the ways in which therapists examine therapy failures is socially constructed and may function to preserve therapists' core beliefs. The three dimensional solution challenges the usefulness of an exclusively causal model for understanding therapists' reflections on failures.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-7757 |
| Date | 01 January 1990 |
| Creators | Hawes, Susan Elizabeth |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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