Correspondence

Letter to the editors from Mary Boston

Dear Editors

We were interested in the paper by Nicholas Midgley in the last issue of the Journal, ‘Sailing between Scylla and Charybdis: Incorporating qualitative approaches into child psychotherapy research’. We certainly agree that the way forward in such research is the more systematic use of qualitative methods as we stressed in our earlier five papers, published in this and other journals.

We were therefore surprised at his statement (p. 93) ‘To my knowledge virtually no child psychotherapists have, up till now, published research making explicit use of qualitative methodologies.’ He adds in a note that there are two such papers deriving from the Tavistock clinical doctorate programme, though some have not yet been published.

There are also several published qualitative research studies by child psychotherapists in books as well as journals, for example on adopted and looked-after children, psychotic and autistic children, eating disorders, sexually abused girls and boy abusers. These, including our own study of adopted and looked after children in psychotherapy, have in common the more systematic use of qualitative methods on a number of cases with the aim of generating new knowledge and further hypotheses. Surely these would come into at least Midgley's ‘second’ circle and some the third. May we respectfully suggest that Midgley researches his references more thoroughly, in spite of his impressive bibliography list.