Clarke and Hogget’s (2009) Researching Beneath the Surface and, more recently, Woodward’s (2015) Psychosocial Studies represent attempts to map the relatively new terrain of psychosocial studies. Although the various methodologies associated with the psychosocial approach constitute a distinct orientation, there is debate around some of the key concepts. For instance, the precise relationship between the self and the social, the type (and use) of psychoanalytic theory and the use of the research process as data have each been subject to theoretical debate.
In the following account, I outline what I take to be three key guiding principles of psychosocial research: 1. the role of narrative in understanding and managing experience. 2. The notion of the discursive unconscious, and 3. the use of process as data. In doing so, I defend the relevance of these concepts for my research questions while at the same time identifying my position within the theoretical debates that currently characterise the psychosocial field.
Position one: the role of narrative in understanding and managing experience
Psychosocial research can be regarded as a constructionist narrative approach, although it differs in some important respects from other forms of narrative analysis (as well as traditional psychoanalytic theory). Key to psychosocial research is the role of narrative in understanding and managing experience. Four key principles can be distilled:
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People tell stories in order to make sense of their lives, identity and experiences Areas of narrative incoherence can act as important information
The construction of narrative helps us to manage anxiety The form of the story is important, as well as its content
I will now outline each of these principles in turn. Firstly, a key tenet of this approach is the idea that people tell stories, both to themselves and to others, in order to manage and make sense of their experiences. Typically, narrative analysis is concerned with the stories that people tell in order to structure and to make sense of their experiences. It is assumed that since ‘people perceive their lives in terms of continuity and process’ (Bryman, 2012: 582) that the stories that individuals tell about their lives can be analysed to provide us with important information about how people understand and construct their identities, their experiences and their social world. Sarbin (2004: 6) for instance, emphasises that stories serve to organise experience and that they must have a ‘beginning, a middle and an ending’. Psychosocial approaches to data analysis are similarly interested in the role of narrative in the construction of identity. For instance, the approaches of Wengraf (2001) and Hollway and Jefferson (2011) both involve the elicitation and analysis of participant’s stories in order to understand the formation of identity over time.
Secondly, however, psychosocial researchers reject what they regard as a ‘preoccupation with coherence’ (Hollway and Jefferson, 2008: 310) and rationality within existing narrative approaches. Psychosocial research is concerned with instances where stories do not follow a predictable structure or do not end with a resolution. The ‘contradictions, elisions’, ‘avoidances’ and absences (Hollway and Jefferson, 2008: 310) that appear when people attempt to narrate their experiences are significant. For psychosocial researchers, areas of incoherence or narrative censorship in people’s stories can act as an important source of information about anxiety.
Thirdly, constructing narratives about one’s life and experiences is understood as performing an important self-regulatory function, namely the management of anxiety. As Hollway and Jefferson (2008: 305) suggest, telling stories is ‘a way of ‘managing’ painfully confusing emotional experiences through words which offer (apparently) the comfort of comprehension and the prospect of control.’ Drawing on psychodynamic ideas, Hollway and Jefferson (2008: 299) argue that stories can sometimes act as a kind of defence where ‘memories of events [that] are too anxiety-provoking, will be either forgotten or recalled in a modified, more acceptable fashion’. Psychosocial researchers are therefore also interested in what is not said,
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or what is apparently excluded, from people’s stories, as well as what it might mean for an individual to struggle to put together an account of their experiences.
Fourthly, for psychosocial researchers the form of the story is important as well as its content. Where methods such as grounded theory or thematic analysis might serve to fragment the data, re-organising it in terms of a certain theme, psychosocial researchers are interested in the changes between apparently disparate topics within the same interview and the way that, in telling their story, people tend to jump from one line of thought to another. These narrative ‘disruptions’ are foregrounded in psychosocial analysis. As Hollway and Jefferson (2008: 308) state:
The particular story told, the manner and detail of its telling, the points emphasised, the morals drawn, all represent choices made by the storyteller. Such choices are revealing, often more so than the teller suspects. This characteristic of storytelling, to contain significances beyond the teller’s intentions, is what it shares with the psychoanalytic method of free associations.
In this sense, the psychosocial approach is underpinned by a rejection of a unitary, all-knowing self in favour of the notion of the ‘defended subject’ (Hollway and Jefferson, 2008: 299). The implication for research is that stories that respondents tell us are not straightforward windows into their world, but are constructed so as to manage (or exclude) anxiety.
Position one: relevance to the research questions
As chapter one of the literature review suggested, assessment in social work can be regarded as a narrative process. Arriving at a professional judgement can be regarded as involving the construction of a coherent narrative in relation to the case. As White and Stancombe (2003: 20) observe:
The processes of … judgement are ‘storied’. Professionals ‘take the history’, then retell it in a form consistent with their specialist knowledge. However, professional narratives contain more than specialist knowledge. They attribute cause and effect and often construct blameworthiness and creditworthiness. Professional stories even humorous anecdotes, are often moral tales.
Analysing social workers’ stories is therefore an appropriate way to examine the construction of professional judgement. With its focus on the construction of narrative, the psychosocial approach therefore represents a particularly appropriate choice to analyse the data.
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As indicated above, psychosocial researchers are interested in the way that narratives are shaped by anxiety. Child welfare social work can be regarded as a profession characterised by the need to make judgements in emotive situations (such as the home visit) in relation to emotive topics (e.g. child abuse and neglect) and is characterised by complexity and uncertainty. As discussed in chapter three, child and social work is a particularly emotionally demanding profession, requiring workers to manage high levels of anxiety. The psychosocial focus on ‘rational intention’ as well as ‘emotional motivation’ (Hollway and Jefferson, 2012: 34) in narrative is therefore particularly relevant to the study of the relationship between reason and emotion in professional judgement.
The psychosocial emphasis on narrative as a way to manage anxiety appealed to me as a result of my prior professional experiences. I noticed in professionals (including myself) a need to ‘tell stories’ to colleagues when they returned to the office from a home visit. After a particularly challenging visit, telling a colleague the story of my visit functioned not only as an opportunity to ‘offload’ but also as a way to organise my thoughts and impressions. I also noticed in myself, and in colleagues, a tendency to use ‘professional speak’ to describe cases which made us feel uncertain or vulnerable. As a researcher, it therefore seemed to me that social workers’ narratives – the stories they told to make sense of their professional experiences – might tell us a great deal about their professional identity as well as how they managed their anxieties in relation to the work.