Research Faculty Committee members

Peter Stratton, Research Faculty Committee Chair

Way back I discovered that doing research made me face and not fudge my beliefs and assumptions. Taking on different research challenges has given me experiences I would never have had otherwise. It has taken me from Brazil to Pakistan and 18 countries in between (it is always important to supervise fieldwork personally), into family homes where children were being abused and into the House of Lords. When I started analysing videos of my own and my students' therapy sessions it was startling to find how much understanding and feeling we were missing while just being in the session then reviewing the recordings during supervision. The main research technique we developed in family therapy (the Leeds Attributional Coding System) is being used around the world and we have found this way of analysing systems of relationships in therapy has much wider application. For a while I ran a research company that used LACS to understand family eating patterns; advised on changing organisational culture (BP, Ford); selected derivatives traders; discovered which drivers are most risky, why TV soaps were losing audience and many other fun areas. We researched what actually happens during therapy (the Leeds Systemic Therapy Manual) and have developed a novel indicator of real effects of therapy on peoples' lives rather than just reduction of symptoms (the SCORE). Now I chair the UKCP Research Faculty Committee and a European research committee and try to persuade others to have the same kinds of fulfilment and enhanced practice that research has given me.

Sheila Butler, member, HIP College

My interests lie in developing an interdisciplinary debate to provide the base for the next generation of research, one which focuses on the interplay between biological, psychological, social and cultural factors.

This has arisen from an awareness of the shortcomings of traditional research approaches in dealing with the complexities and challenges of contemporary social, environmental, political and economic issues.

I am interested in exploring interdisciplinary approaches for understanding and researching change processes with particular interests in the areas of interpersonal relationships and emotions. For many years, I've been interested in investigating peoples' experiences and understandings of emotions, looking at emotional development and how feelings are expressed (or suppressed) and the verbal and non-verbal affective communication between people.

I also have established interests in the areas of mixed methods and creative and collaborative research. I am currently developing practice-based projects in the NHS in a number of areas, including: investigating the process and outcomes of psychotherapy in the NHS, the Psychological Therapies Services re-design and the specialist Personality Disorders Therapeutic Community Service. The projects examine practices in Psychotherapy Services, understandings of clients' experiences and perceptions of change.
I am also an Associate Lecturer at the Open University developing courses on Child Development, Research with Children and Young People and am also part of the development of the Open University schemes supporting students learning with virtual and multi-media based technologies.

My questions, observations and experience have led me to focus on the research-practice interface and on the potential of different methods of research to open up a space for new ideas and collective thinking on creativity and collaboration. In this way, I am currently working to develop and implement the Practitioner Research Network (UKCP PRN) to provide a space for exploration, mutual learning across a community of practitioners, bringing together psychotherapists and researchers, at different stages in their career, to strengthen and add new dimensions to psychotherapy practice.

Nick Cape, member, HIP College

25 years ago, when I was working in health development in Papua New Guinea, a randomised control trial was carried out by the PNG Institute of Medical Research on a village health aid project in which I was working. The RCT was a shambles, but I became interested in research and started working with the Institute of Medical research to find ways of doing valid research in areas where it is impossible to do "scientific randomised control trials". I enjoyed it, and did a research thesis on the subject.

25 years later I have moved from Papua New Guinea to Devon and from primary health care, through sheep farming, to psychotherapy. But in 2009 I found that the status of psychotherapy was being judged as lacking by these same "scientific randomised control trials" being used in a field that is as fraught with inaccuracies as the PNG outback. This inspired me to join the RFC to be able to contribute again to the research debate.

I am a Core Process (Humanistic and Integrative) Psychotherapist working in private practice. I am neither attached to an academic university nor involved in carrying out research myself.

Thus, within the committee I also represent the ordinary UKCP member who is not a researcher, but wishes to know if their work is effective and to be able to justify it in the present day when published research is becoming increasingly the standard by which good practice is judged.

Angela Cotter, member, HIP College

My main research interest is in the intersubjectivity of therapeutic relationships. This stems back to my Phd which I did in 1990. A qualitative exploration of the concept of the wounded healer as applied to nursing, my thesis looked at nurses' own experience of severe acute or chronic illness in themselves. The main finding was that the illness experience made the interviewed nurses conscious of an internal split between the healthy nurse as strong and capable and the patient as weak and vulnerable. Prior to this I was already interested in the contrasting views of staff and users of health and social care and took this forward between 1996-2000 as a DoH and locally-funded action researcher in health and social care settings looking at staff and older peoples' experience of the interface of hospital and community care. More recently I interviewed 30 people with experiences of both giving and receiving care across a range of disciplines. Although I see myself as primarily a narrative and biographical researcher with a focus on changing attitudes through this kind of approach, I did train in, and teach, evidence based healthcare in the early 1990s, and have been involved in 'evidence based' policy making within both nursing and psychotherapy. Since my PhD and my subsequent training in psychotherapy, I have emphasised the importance of a reflexive approach. I value very much the strand of research that emphasises the researcher's own experience and perspective as crucial to the research produced, as it is to the psychotherapy which we practice. I am very interested in the new developments in social research, for example, the focus on embodiment in research and the use of creative arts approaches. I also have a particular interest in the ethical issues in psychotherapeutic research.

Andrew Wadge, member, HIP College

One of the key challenges for psychotherapists is to be able to understand and demonstrate 'what works' in our clinical practice. As someone relatively newly qualified, I am influenced in the approaches and interventions I use by the experience and advice of my trainers and supervisors and of course by reflection on my own practice. I am interested in those moments when the therapy seems to shift - and equally, although frustratingly, when it doesn't. In those moments when the client made significant breakthroughs in their insight and understanding, was it something I said or they way I said it or the timing of an intervention - or indeed, none of the above? Whilst individual reflections can be helpful and insightful, understanding gained from carefully conducted research holds the promise of much more powerful insights into the 'what works' in therapy. This is important on two counts: first, because we want to do the best we can for our clients and this can be directly informed by the outcomes of research; and second, because in the wider role that psychotherapy plays in society there is a need to demonstrate the effectiveness of many different approaches in psychotherapy.

Philippa Whittick, UKCP Vice-chair (education, training, practice and research)

My interest in research these days is almost completely driven by my desire to understand more about what works for whom. I work in a busy NHS Child and Adolescent Mental Health team and I'm interested in outcomes for young people and their families. In our service we tend to see families who are under-resourced, stressed, ill-equipped to cope with illnesses they know little about, and quite often feeling unsupported by the professional network that exists to support them. Coming from a fairly classical adult psychotherapy background, I realised quite early on that open-ended, 'gold-standard' psychotherapy just wasn't going to cut it with these families. They do not have the time, the money or the inclination to go there, and they need interventions that bring about change next week and next month, not next year.
 
My personal interest most recently has been in developing services for families who have been bereaved by suicide and, for the last few years, I have been actively engaged with both thinking about, and piloting, effective interventions for these families, especially where there are very young children, for whom there is almost no literature or support. My other key area of interest is around the discourses of psychotherapy and the way that they continue to remain inaccessible to so many. 

David Winter, member, HIP College

Since the early 1970s, I have conducted research in the following interrelated areas:
i) application of personal construct psychology to clinical problems: this has included the development and evaluation of personal construct psychotherapeutic approaches;
ii) repertory grid technique as a psychotherapy research measure: this has involved the derivation of individualised outcome indices from this technique, the principal personal construct assessment method;
iii) personal styles and treatment choice: this has indicated that therapists' and clients' preferences for, and responses to, different forms of therapy reflect their 'personal styles', which therefore provide a basis for treatment selection;
iv) therapeutic process: this has included the identification of differences in the process of personal construct and cognitive therapies;
v) broadening of the evidence base for psychological therapies: a comprehensive review of the evidence, both quantitative and qualitative, is currently being undertaken.

My primary concerns in these research programmes have been to develop understandings and treatments of clinical problems, therapy outcome measures, and frameworks for treatment selection which take account of the personal meaning of clients' experiences; and to do justice to the evidence, broadly defined, of the effectiveness of the full range of psychological therapies.   

Alan McConnon, UKCP Senior Regulation Co-ordinator

Alan previously worked for the General Medical Council and his background is in regulation. However since he has been at UKCP he has become fascinated by the relevancy of psychotherapy to everyday life and how psychotherapists are able to use the various philosophies of psychotherapy to tackle issues and make real differences to lives.

As Registrar, Alan is responsible for working with relevant UKCP committees in maintaining the integrity of the UKCP registers, ensuring processes and procedures are in place to obtain the information relevant to supporting an individual's application to UKCP and overseeing the annual random audit of individual members.

Liz McDonnell, UKCP Research Fellow

I come to psychotherapy research as a relative outsider to psychotherapy but as a relative insider to the field of research. I have worked as a social researcher since the mid '90s on various projects including those around: health, family, gender, disability and education and the intersections between them. My PhD research explored people's desires for having children using life story approaches and my heart probably lies here - in the individual stories that people tell about the things that matter to them. 

Although I have worked a lot in universities, much of my work has been with community partners and I enjoy being involved in research that has a practical and visible impact. The distance between what happens in academic institutions and the world outside them can be huge and being part of a meaningful two way translation process can be exciting and productive. Research ethics, how the researcher accounts for themselves within research, innovative research methods, as well as how diverse research methods can be complementary are areas of interest for me. Psychotherapy research touches on some hugely significant questions about what it is possible to know and the best methods for developing knowledge about the processes that facilitate change in individuals - in relation to their perspectives, emotions, bodies and behaviour.

On a personal note, research is a great way to engage a curious mind.

Tirril Harris, member, CPJA College

Tirril divides her time between clinical work in private practice with adults and research in Social Psychiatry with George Brown, based at the Socio-medical Research Group, Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College, University of London.

The Brown-Harris model of depression, which has emerged from this colleague-ship of some thirty years, succeeds in blending ideas from both medical sociology and psychoanalytic thought and in collecting data to verify these insights about the mutual influence between outer and inner worlds. This research team was responsible for developing the Attachment Style Interview (ASI) to embody John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth's categorisation of secure and insecure attachment patterns, the latter predicting depressive onset in prospective follow-up, along with recent severe life events, low self-esteem, childhood adversity and chronic sublinical symptoms.

Tirril was a member of John Bowlby's research group and has found that his Attachment Theory has been the key link between the two strands of her work, clinical and research. She is a member of FIP and of the London Centre for Psychotherapy.

Del Loewenthal, member, UPCA

Terence Nice, member, CPJA College

Fran Renwick, member, College of Hypno-psychotherapists