In the existing research, quantitative methods have yielded valuable findings in confirming and expanding upon the belief that people with anorexia evoke negative feelings in therapists. However, the richness of this experience has not been the focus of, has been captured in, these studies as suggested by Gelso, Hill, Mohr, Rochlen, and Zack (1999). The focus has been on trying to understand the cause and effect relationship between working with these clients and the resulting emotions. Similarly the anecdotal accounts of this phenomenon are insightful, detailed and capture a sense of the complexity surrounding this area but they only explore the author’s perspective and reality and there is not a sense of a collective experience.
This research is committed to exploring, describing, interpreting, and putting into context how each participant makes sense of their emotional reactions in response to their anorexic clients. It was imperative that the participants provided this information in their own words to capture their experience, their sense making and their relationship to their experience (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998).
As Solomon (2006) argued “it is as living human beings, not just as scientists, that we want to understand and appreciate our emotional lives”, (p.1). This belief captures the underlying premise of the current study in its quest to understand more fully therapists’
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emotional experiences. A qualitative method was adopted as it provided the means to explore the research questions and to enable a richer description of the experience and capture the complexity of the phenomenon. Qualitative methods would also enable the presentation of a collective account which has gone through a set of analytic stages to ensure that the research is rigorous.
There are wider aspects of the intentions of this research that would be best addressed by qualitative methods. The research aimed to produce findings which are particularly applicable to clinical settings, and qualitative methods are considered to be ideally suited to this (Gilgun, 1992). Jarman et al. (1997) emphasised that qualitative methodological approaches for clinically oriented research are valuable, especially in the field of eating disorders. Furthermore, research that investigates the concept of countertransference in psychotherapy and its implications has moved into a qualitative paradigm (e.g., Hill, 2005).
Rationale for a phenomenological approach
The nature of therapy is a phenomenological encounter in which one tries to understand the essence and quality of another’s lived experience. For this research a phenomenological perspective was required to focus on the embodied experience of therapists, whilst accounting for and acknowledging the complex reflexive process required throughout this process with regard to researcher and participant.
Rationale for Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis
IPA was considered the most compatible qualitative methodology because of its in-depth analysis of an individual’s lived experience (Eatough & Smith, 2008). As Smith et al. (2009) claimed “emotional experience is probably one of the strongest prevailing themes in the IPA literature” (p.200). Its ability to describe experience through inclusion of areas such as discourse, affect and cognitions made it the most compatible method for this research (Smith, et al., 2009). It enabled an investigation of the individual cognitions and experiences involved in the emotional reactions towards this client group (Eatough & Smith, 2008) alongside the scope to make tentative inferences about these aspects of their experience based on the participant’s collective experience.
Language is another important feature of the study alongside the other aspects previously discussed. It is important to explain that Foucauldian Discourse analysis (FDA) was considered but was not thought to be as suitable in addressing the aims of this research. However, the particular approach to IPA that has been adopted does
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share some common ground with FDA in examining how an individual’s world is discursively constructed and how these shape their experience. This type of IPA acknowledges multiple influences, such as cultural, historical and social influence. It does this alongside recognition of discourses but its core focus is on the participant’s overall experience (Eatough & Smith, 2008). The focus of this research is to throw light on the internal subjective experiences of the individuals, as well as reveal something about the outward social activity and the implications of this, if it arises. Discursive analysis could have overlooked the emphasis on internal activity, whereas IPA provides the opportunity to review the wider socio-cultural factors impacting on the researcher and participants’ experiences, as well as the internal experience.
Eatough and Smith (2008) stated that “what is missing from such {discursive} accounts are the private, psychologically forceful, rich and often indefinable aspects of emotional life” (p.184). In this research, language has been approached as something that can uncover a deeper emotional experience. Emotions have been illustrated by Eatough and Smith (2008) to not just be discursive acts; they say that discursive accounts of emotions are not just illustrations of cultural labels that have been attached to something experiential, but may be purposeful in the communication, whether consciously or unconsciously. This suggests that language is affected by emotions, and that regardless of language, these experiences would still occur.
Grounded theory was contemplated as a methodological approach to this research area, but was considered less suitable than IPA because of the research’s aim to provide a detailed and nuanced analysis of the emotional experience of the participants. If a grounded theory method was applied to this research, a theoretical account of the phenomenon of emotional experience would be produced (Smith et al., 2009). It was not the focus of this research to produce such a conceptual explanation or understanding of the phenomenon. It was considered that this approach might jeopardise the aim to provide the individual divergences and convergences amongst a small sample.
In relation to other qualitative methods, IPA is developing a reputation for being epistemologically flexible which can be desirable in psychological research (Larkin, Watts, & Clifton, 2006). IPA’s flexibility with regard to methodological approach enabled a novel and adaptive method to suit the research and its aims. It allowed for the use of different data collection methods as well as an interpretative analysis of the raw data.
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