Practitioner-Based Research: Power, Discourse and Transformation

Practitioner-Based Research is concerned, in particular, with the research which is undertaken by healthcare practitioners and the evidence which they generate as a result of investigating their practice. In so doing it recognizes that, as well as working in academic life, practitioner researchers are often working as practitioners outside the Academy. It argues that the work of practitioner researchers has a significant contribution to make to healthcare research and so needs to be disseminated further in order to create balanced research communities within the healthcare professions.

This book will help academic researchers to broaden the limited ontological and epistemological perspectives of their research. It will also encourage healthcare practitioners who have not been trained academically to develop their research skills and to realize that they are actually researching in their practice on a day-to-day basis. Finally, it will provide a degree of transparency about therapeutic processes to help clients and patients to see aspects of professional practice and development which are usually hidden from them.

The contributors cover a wide range of themes, such as the limitations of academic life and conventional medical models; ethics; the importance of imaginative writing and the use of story; metaphor and myth; the importance of personal transformation in the professional development of healthcare workers; and the relevance of belief and spirituality to healthcare research.