The value of individual case-study research: the subjective experience of Looked After Children and its implication for working with the network around the Looked After Child

The new Professional or Clinical Doctorates in Child Psychotherapy are producing a generation of child psychotherapists who are able to hold their own in debates about the evidence base for child psychotherapy. They are acquiring many research skills, including those that will allow them to undertake qualitative research projects that will enrich our understanding of process and technique.

This symposium takes the opportunity to showcase some very recently completed, fascinating and unpublished doctoral projects and focuses on three dissertations based on single case studies of child psychotherapy with children who are members of a particular group: Looked After Children or Children in Kinship Care.

Each presentation will illustrate how qualitative methods were developed to address a particular research question and describe major findings and conclusions reached. The researchers will talk about what they have learned by doing research that went beyond what could be established through the psychoanalytic clinical method itself.

One classical objection to qualitative methodology, which may apply even more so to single case studies, is that it is difficult to generalize from the results to other comparable cases. How do these researchers address this issue? One way is through locating the particular case study in the context of other literature on the particular group of children, both clinical literature and research literature. Another is to establish whether there is a basis for what Ursula Dreher (200) called ‘conceptual generalisation’, where qualitative research gives rise to new theoretical ideas that can be tested out against larger populations. Arguably Gianna Henry’s highly influential concept of ‘double deprivation’ involved through the interaction between clinical observation and the ongoing discussions between participants of the research workshop on psychotherapy with severely deprived children that took place at the Tavistock in the late nineteen seventies/ early eighties. This workshop depended crucially on the furthering of Bion’s theories of containment and the emotional bases of learning, and also from the insight his work gave into the importance of working to promote communication and thinking in the network around the Looked After Child, and the impediments to doing this.

Could doctoral research projects on work with cases that have defining characteristics in common lead to parallel discoveries that can be grouped to give rise to theoretical ideas or concepts that can pave the way to new clinical discoveries? This seminar explores this exciting possibility. It will be of widespread interest, both to those interested in case of single-case research and with illuminating the experience of Looked after Children.