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This book makes an important contribution to the field of psychotherapy research for clinicians. It is especially timely as it responds to the demand of the current climate for critical thinking and evaluation of ongoing clinical work. The book is based on the authors’ teaching and supervision on postgraduate psychotherapy training programmes at the University of Kent. The authors achieve their intention to provide an overview of methods that may help clinicians examine the process of their clinical work through carrying out sound ethical research. Guidance on ethics and application for ethical approval is provided. The authors are clear that they cannot provide extensive details of the different tools. Readers can use the book as a guide to the issues in carrying out research on the psychotherapy process, or can use it more as a handbook to dip into sections on specific methods, and follow up references to find out more about a particular approach. This is the main, valuable function of the book, although the presence of the book also has value in highlighting the need for ongoing research into the psychotherapy process.
The book is divided into four parts. The first part provides a brief background to a psychotherapy research, and includes descriptions of methodology and methods such as data collection and analysis, including sampling, reliability and validity issues, followed by an overview of the main concepts of the research process. The authors seek to steer a course between the two opposing camps of quantitative and qualitative research by organizing the book in terms of how to test general theory using coding strategies and build new theory using discourse approaches.