Abstract
The mental health clinic poses unique challenges for social work scholar-practitioners. The familiar setting, the nature of mental health data collection, and the researcher’s clinical training and experience all complicate efforts to maintain a reflexive stance in research. Additionally, conducting research in a clinical environment risks replicating a hierarchical medical model in the research relationship. Using a theoretical framework of critical realism, two doctoral-level scholar practitioners analyzed the advantages and challenges of conducting research in a clinical setting. Audit trails and experiences of peer debriefing from their dissertation research served as the basis for this conceptual analysis. The analysis considers the impact of the clinic setting on the power dynamics of the research process, as well as the researchers’ subjective experiences throughout the process of data collection. The authors discuss the risks of Othering and the challenges of straddling insider and outsider identities as scholar-practitioners in clinic settings. To navigate these dual identities of researcher and clinician, the authors recommend maintaining awareness of power dynamics and discourses, debriefing regularly with peers and mentors, introducing reflexive practices into both interviews and writing, and moving beyond binary identities in order to occupy a “space between.”
Highlights
The mental health clinic poses unique challenges for social work scholarpractitioners
Wearing “dual hats” of practitioner and researcher in such a setting can both facilitate and inhibit the researcher’s capacity to navigate the power dynamics between the researcher and research participants. This conceptual analysis examined the context of the mental health clinic as the setting for two research projects, both conducted by practitioner-researcher doctoral students
We applied a critical realist framework in order to analyze how the context of the clinic shaped both the process and power dynamics of the research; we explored how power and authority were negotiated in the mental health clinic in the arena of Othering (Sands & Krumer-Nevo, 2006)
Summary
This analysis was grounded in the philosophical paradigm of critical realism (Houston, 2010; Longhofer & Floersch, 2012). This stance acknowledges that events and behavior that take place in the real world cannot be meaningfully understood without exploring how individuals make sense of them, based on their assumptions and prior experiences (Maxwell, 2013) In this analysis, a critical realist perspective allowed us to recognize both the reality of mental illness, as well as the social discourses that construe how mental illness is perceived, conceptualized, and discussed by providers, clients, and mental health service researchers (Longhofer & Floersch, 2012). Unseen mechanisms function to reproduce social positions and relations (Houston, 2010) In this conceptual paper, we analyze how the institutional context of the mental health clinic influenced the process of social work research in that setting. The clinic context influenced intersubjective dynamics in research relationships with providers and clients
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