As stated in Chapter 1, the impetus for this research came from requests from pupils for an online form of therapeutic support to supplement the f2f school-based provision. The findings from the PEP (Chapter 2) were also influential in planning the design of the FP.
The main results of the PEP were twofold:
1. Respondents expressed a desire and exhibited a need for more information regarding online counselling with young people in general, and more
specifically in schools. However, such information was already available (see Chapter 3), therefore there was a clear need to connect practitioners to the information. I used this evidence to inform the development of a training course for counsellors working with young people to work therapeutically online (Chapter 9).
2. I also used the results of the PEP to attempt to address some of the apparent gaps in the knowledge base in this area i.e. a small scale
exploratory study with pupils in the specific setting of UK secondary schools.
The Practice Evaluation Project reported in Chapter 2 suggested a desire for evidence of successfully reaching pupils that might have psychological barriers to accessing f2f
help, as well as evidence that online counselling in schools would make accessing the service easier for pupils. There was also a request for general information about how pupils might use this facility (for example which issues might be better suited to any particular medium, whether there were any gender differences in uptake and so on) and to understand whether online counselling in schools was as effective as f2f. Undoubtedly, these questions called for a more quantitative research approach to provide evidence of uptake and effectiveness.
Alongside this research a strong practical element would be required, as I would need to develop a school-based online counselling resource, as an adjunct to the long established f2f provision. I would also need to work closely with senior management in this group of schools to embed this into current systems, policies and procedures (as will be outlined in Chapters 6). It was important to these individuals that quantitative results were produced for this new venture into online counselling, so that they could clearly understand how it ‘measured up’ to the results provided by the current counselling service (usage numbers and outcome measure scores particularly). The future funding for this provision was also reliant upon providing evidence of uptake and effectiveness first and foremost, over and above accounts of pupil’s experiences.
However, I was also always mindful of my initial reason for embarking on exploration of this area i.e. the unprompted requests from the pupil satisfaction survey (Hennigan, 2011) and thus wanted to investigate this development from the perspective of ‘pupil voice’ too. Research that considers clients experiences of this medium (as a key stakeholder in the counselling relationship) was therefore central to my research interests.
Questions that arose from the PEP, such as uptake and effectiveness, seemed best suited to a quantitative approach. Yet my other questions were ‘What might school
counsellors need to know about clients experiences, that they did not know they needed to know? And ‘What do pupils think and feel about this subject?’ These types
A research approach was needed that could be used ‘to obtain different but complementary data on the same topic’ (Morse, 1991, p.122). This approach could also bring together the differing strengths and weaknesses of both quantitative and qualitative analyses (Goss & Mearns, 1997), by illustrating quantitative results with qualitative findings for example, or where possible synthesizing them to develop a broader understanding of school-based online counselling in UK secondary schools. An approach that considered both quantitative and qualitative data important was therefore required.
My early background in psychology (and a short career as a statistician) has led to a strong belief that some types of evidence are more convincing than others, namely those based on a scientific paradigm that values systematically manipulated, observable data that can be measured (a positivist paradigm). However, later training in Humanistic Counselling (Rogers, 1961 & 1980) challenged and changed this worldview to one where understanding, or meaning of phenomena are formed from the perspective of subjective experience/s. This understanding or meaning of phenomena are considered to be constructed by people experiencing things and then reflecting upon those experiences, as well as personal histories (Berger & Luckmann, 1967) i.e. a world-view that there is also a reality, independent of our thinking about it, that science could research (a constructivist paradigm).
As a scientist and researcher, it was important to me to endeavour to determine truths about reality, yet at the same time I understood that this was an impossible goal. This complexity called for more than either searching for ‘deep, rich observational data’ or ‘hard, generalizable survey data’ (Sieber, 1973, p.1335) to better understand human behaviour and experience. A combination of both forms of data would, surely, provide the most complete analysis? This does not mean an approach where ‘anything goes’ (Shaw & Frost, 2015, p.340), but more one that is informed by utilising the strengths of each approach, to provide a fuller picture than any one approach could arrive at alone.
However, this type of approach has been much debated in the past decades. According to Onwuegbuzie (2003), ‘much of the quantitative-qualitative debate has involved the practice of polemics, which has tended to obfuscate rather than to clarify,
and to divide rather than to unite educational researchers’ (Onwuegbuzie, 2003, p. 394). An answer to this tension was thus to look for an underlying philosophy that informed the needs for both qualitative and quantitative data collection. This is where the critical-realist perspective provided a solution.