Research in the Trust reflects its unique clinical concentration on systemic and psychodynamic/analytic therapeutic methods. Such therapies assume that the personality of the therapist, his or her unique individuality, forms a key part of the clinical work which works from the encounter of one or more patients with one or more therapists. The analytic and systemic theory bases do postulate commonalities across people, both patients and therapists, but there is much larger emphasis on personal uniqueness than in pharmacological or the cognitive and behavioural approaches to psychological therapies.
Reflecting this situation, research in the Trust has traditionally been based on narrative case and infant observation reports with an emphasis on "idiographic" data (pictures, often word pictures but the work of the Robertsons on reactions of children separated from parents during hospital admissions pioneered the use of film data). By contrast, "nomothetic" methods (those in which everyone is measured on the same dimensions, e.g. height, weight, depression severity, anxiety level) were peripheral despite the careful data collection by Bowlby in his early work ("Forty juvenile thieves") and the later comparative trials by Malan.
This situation has changed markedly in the last decade and nomothetic methods now include:
Meanwhile more formal qualitative methods have increasingly influenced the more traditional idiographic and narrative evidence bases that have led to so much theory development in the clinic. Such developments have included the use of grounded theory, discourse analysis and interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) particularly in research into therapy process led by Professor Frosh and Dr. Burck in their work on systemic therapy process.
As well as these two major lines of qualitative and quantitative research, we are also exploring hybrid methods and ways of exploiting complementarity of the two. This has developed through:
