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Community as client : an investigation of what helps and what hinders the integration of social justice into counselling practice

University of British Columbia

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the factors that promote or detract from the integration of social justice (SJ) into counselling practice. Research shows that psychological well-being is contingent on the presence of SJ (Prilleltensky, 1999; 2012), therefore, it must be a priority in the practice of counselling psychology. Over the past ten years there has been an increasing amount of literature written about the importance of integrating SJ into counselling practice (Lewis, 2011), but there appears to be a gap in applied research that explores the factors that promote or detract from successfully integrating SJ into counselling practice. By using the enhanced critical incident technique (Butterfield, Borgen, Maglio, & Amundson, 2009), this investigation sought to answer the following research question: How do counselling psychologists successfully integrate SJ into their practice? Six registered counsellors and two counselling psychologists from North America, who reported that that feel that they are doing well at integrating SJ into their practice were interviewed. Data analysis and interpretation identified contextual issues, common factors among positive and negative incidents of integrating SJ into counselling practice, as well as wish list items of resources that were not present at the time of integrating SJ, but that participants felt would have helped them to effectively integrate SJ into their counselling practice. To increase the trustworthiness of the research results, nine credibility checks were conducted throughout the study (Butterfield et al., 2009).

Text

2015-08-17

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/54491

Counselling Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/