Collaboration,meaning‐making and therapy: What practitioners can learn from recent developments in qualitative research

Recent developments in qualitative research provide a rich resource of ideas and insights for counsellors and psychotherapists interested in postmodern approaches to theory and practice. The second edition of the landmark Handbook of Qualitative Research (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000) is discussed in terms of its potential value for therapists.     

Impacts of Home-Based Telework on Quality of Life for Employees and Their Partners. Quantitative and Qualitative Results From a European Survey

The study investigates the effects of home-based telework on quality of life (QoL). Four dimensions of QoL were analysed; overall satisfaction with life, sense of belonging, sense of becoming and sense of being. Through cross-national survey data (from 217 job holders and 112 partners) and by means of structural equation modeling, a positive association was found between home-based telework to a worker's sense of belonging (beta = 0.30, p < 0.001). On the other hand, a negative path was detected from the job holder's home-based telework to his or her partner's overall satisfaction with life (beta = –0.27, p < 0.05). After controlling for subdimensions of life quality, home-based work did not affect the job holder's overall life satisfaction. Moreover, the more concentration the job holder reported, the lower the sense of belonging was reported by his or her partner (beta = –0.28, p < 0.05). No simple explanation for the negative effects were found, but our interviews with the group of workers and their families leave us the impression that the problem of overworking and withdrawal was most relevant to the cases, in combination with negative spill-over effects and unclear boundary settings in the home.     

Getting curious about meaning-making in counselling (1)1

Counselling offers many experimental opportunities from which counsellors can learn and develop their meaning-making skills. Recent developments in qualitative research, and in social constructionist approaches to counselling, point to new ways of conceptualising the conversations of counselling and guidance. In particular, a hermeneutic view of counselling attunes counsellors and guidance practitioners to the particular meanings and meaning-making potentials clients and students bring to counselling and guidance conversations. Accordingly, our questions and proposed solutions can be seen as engaging the meaning-making efforts of clients in ways we, and they, can learn from. Our conversations offer many potential experiments in meaning-making, should we think of what others do with what we say—as occurring across a gap of conversational potential. This article explores ways to adopt, and learn from, such a hermeneutic frame in our conversations with clients and students.     

Spontaneous and learned turning behaviour in food- or water-restricted hooded rats

Some laboratory studies have suggested that whereas food restriction in animals leads to response alternation (behavioural flexibility), water restriction induces perseverative, stereotyped responding. Hooded rats, restricted to 1 hour per day access to either food or water, were tested on a radial-arm maze (using a procedure that eliminates algorithmic response strategies), for alternation in a 3-arm maze (both when the maze was familar and unfamilar, and with or without differential reward) and a 2-choice maze in which some animals were taught to alternate direction of turn, and others to perseverate. Both groups performed the radial-arm maze task competently and spontaneously alternated at a high rate. In the learned task, food-restricted rats were slower than water-restricted to reverse a consistent direction of turn; in the alternation condition, water-restricted rats developed a temporary, but strong, directional bias when making their first choice each day. Water-restricted subjects took water more readily than food-restricted took food when initially introduced to the apparatuses, but there was no consistent difference in motivation in the two conditions. The results provide little support for the notion that distinct cognitive-motivational states or behavioural strategies are induced by food- and water-restriction.