Hazel James

Making sense of loss and grief: the value of in-depth assessments

Abstract Research in a community-based bereavement support service has revealed a proportion of clients for whom an assessment session which focuses on meaning-making mitigates the need for ongoing professional intervention. We suggest that such in-depth assessment sessions may consolidate resilience by helping clients construct meaning in relation to their loss. We support our position with four case studies using assimilation analysis.

Observing a client's grieving process: bringing logical positivism into qualitative grief counselling research

This positional paper originates from our need as researcher/practitioners to establish a meaningful epistemological framework for research into bereaved peoples journey through loss and grief over time. We describe how the field of grief research has a long and established biological basis, in keeping with a positivist epistemology. However, there has been a diminution of the influence of logical positivism in twenty-first-century counselling research. We argue that in grief counselling research, naturalistic observation of the grieving process within a logical positivist paradigm, remains a valid and valuable construct. We posit an observational protocol for the grief counselling process which minimises the intrusion of research method into the therapeutic process. We offer this as a means of conducting qualitative research within a bereavement counselling service. Further, we suggest that the development of an observational protocol for a clients grieving process has potential implications for developing good practice in grief work.