Reply to Mary Boston and Dora Lush

Even in the short time since my paper was published, I am very pleased to say that several people have contacted me pointing out valuable examples of qualitative research undertaken by child psychotherapists that I had failed to refer to - an indication, I think, of how active our profession has already been in the field of research, despite

anxieties to the contrary. Mary Boston and Dora Lush have in many respects led the way when it comes to our profession thinking seriously about research and I am very sorry that I did not refer to their ground-breaking work (e.g. Boston, 1989; Boston and Lush, 1994, Lush et al., 1998). Having said that, I do feel the research they describe in these papers has a slightly different methodological basis to the kind of work I was trying to explore (but no less valuable for that), although I agree that their research topic - the finely-tuned, long-term evaluation of psychoanalytic child psychotherapy - falls completely within the second and - to some degree - third circles I described.

Perhaps I should have stressed more clearly that my paper was not intended as a comprehensive review of all the relevant child psychotherapy research already out there; rather, it was a more personal account of some of the material related to qualitative methodology that I had come across during the course of doing my own doctoral research - a journey of discovery that had so excited me I thought it worth sharing with other child psychotherapists who might be thinking about undergoing the rather daunting - and at times isolated - task of engaging in research themselves. In particular, I wanted to draw attention to work taking place slightly outside our own field - by sociologists, adult psychotherapists, family therapists and others - as I imagined that other child psychotherapists were perhaps less likely to have come across these papers.

By sharing with others some of the inspiring work I came across during my rather haphazard journey, I hoped to hel