Ronald J. Chenail

Communicating Your Qualitative Research Better

The editors and authors of the Family Business Review (FBR) have an impressive track record of reflecting on how we can collectively better the ways we explore the dynamics of family-controlled enterprises (e.g., Bird, Welsch, Astrachan, & Pistrui, 2002; Dyer & Sánchez, 1998; Handler, 1989; Sharma, 2004; Zahra & Sharma, 2004). An important methodological approach to studying this exploration rigorously, qualitative research, has also been the subject of some wonderfully insightful FBR articles (e.g., Kenyon-Rouvinez, 2001; Lambrecht & Lievens, 2008), which present family business researchers with best practices for conducting and presenting the results of their future qualitative investigations. Given the increasing usage of case studies in family business research through the influence of innovative programs such as Babson College’s STEP Project for Family Enterprising (see http://www 3.babson.edu/eship/step/), it seemed prudent to continue the journal’s didactic tradition by focusing this editorial note on qualitative inquiry. So, drawing on my work with qualitative research authors from around the world the past 19 years as editor of The Qualitative Report and mentoring family therapy and science contributors to the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy as editor since 2005, I offer the following five ways to communicate your qualitative research methods and results better: (a) make the local globally significant; (b) mark differences between methodology and method; (c) manage errors of deficiency and exuberance; (d) maintain coherence across your report; and (e) make transparency goal one.

Family systems rehabilitation

Abstract Although researchers and practitioners have demonstrated the utility and success of combining rehabilitation medicine and family therapy, for the most part, these projects have been isolated, one-shot demonstration projects, or well-meaning calls for future considerations. As of yet, family therapy has not been combined or integrated with rehabilitation medicine for a long-term, cost-effective, and well-integrated approach to treating patients and their families. The authors of this paper present a preliminary report on their two-year project dedicated to the creation and development of a rehabilitation-family therapy collaborative model of assessment and treatment for patients and their families. Particulars of the projects evolution are discussed and the practice model is demonstrated through the presentation of two case studies.

Commentary on Studying Circular Questioning “In Situ”

In their discursive study of circular questioning in a systemic family therapy session, the authors raise some interesting perspectives on the original Milan therapy teams guidelines for the therapist as the conductor of therapy. By emphasizing circularity from a discourse point of view, they suggest these guidelines can be used to help family members hypothesize about their own perspectives on themselves and the other family members in circular terms, and, drawing upon Cecchins notion of neutrality, by creating a state of curiosity in their talk and maybe in their minds. Their emphasis on circularity also helps us to become more sensitive to ways in which the natural recursion in language can help us to appreciate the new guiding lines circular questions can suggest with previously spoken elements. If we follow this line of argument, then circular questions can be seen as a critical part of a therapy we can call recursive family therapy in which we use the recursive element of all natural living languages to help our clients to recursively change their language and lives naturally.

Searching for Family Therapy in the Rockies: Family Therapists Meet A Paleontologist

Family therapists use concepts germane to other academic disciplines. We recount four notions--context, explanatory metaphors, language conventions, and persistently refining knowledge--that family therapists and paleontologists each utilize. Revisiting family therapys foundational concepts through the lens of another discipline reminds us of our theoretical beginnings, highlights those professional adaptations that we have made over the years, and offers us an opportunity to reinvigorate and expand our central organizing principles.

Family Therapy Stories: Stretching Customary Family Therapy Practices

We have created a collection of stories from our authors to provide another glimpse into ways that social injustices manifest themselves in daily interactions and events. The stories each have a different focus on transformation and/or social justice. We offer you stories of trying to explain social justice work in clinical practice, a supervisee’s emotional reaction, a student therapist’s own personal transformation through her professional preparation, the heartbreak of seeing and experiencing injustice inflicted by the helping profession, the complications and unfairnesses that occur when multiple helping systems do not coordinate, what possibilities emerge when there is a softening of the distinction between professionals and clients, and moving from seeing family problems appearing as internal to have external originations. Each story is then followed by a series of questions evoked by the story to help provide a pathway to continue to ponder issues of social justice/injustice in the therapeutic context.

Everyday Solution-Focused Recursion: When Family Therapy Faculty, Supervisors, Researchers, Students, and Clients Play Well Together

In academic clinical programs, a constant challenge is to transform the “hardening of the categories,” that is, relational patterns keeping teachers, supervisors, researchers, students, and clients in traditional roles that support isolation, conflict, and disengagement. To address this concern in our family therapy department and training clinic, we have moved from an oppressive pedagogy to an appreciative andragogy by embracing a solution-focused recursion between the roles we play to “soften” traditional boundaries creating more playful, flat, relational patterns leading to more therapy-informed research, more research-informed clinical practices, and more egalitarian faculty–student relations. Oh, and the clients seem to benefit too!