The Views of Psychotherapies project seeks to evoke, represent and understand children’s perspectives of their engagement in psychotherapy interventions in residential out of home care in Malta. This paper presents and problematizes the initial, emergent data from a thematic analysis of around 30 interviews with children aged 10 to 18 who accessed psychotherapy services whilst living in residential care.
Within child psychotherapy research, recent literature notes the paucity of research on children’s perspectives on their experience of therapy (Dittmann & Jensen, 2014; Henriksen, 2014) and critiques the tendency to position children as objects rather than participants in research (Polvere, 2014). Within the field of out of home care, Aslam (2012) reports that research which includes looked after children’s views of mental health services in evaluating provision, is very limited.
Through the use of emerging thematic analysis data, this paper addresses how children's perspectives of these psychotherapy interventions may be evoked, conceptualised, represented and understood. Within Voices of Psychotherapies children’s perspectives were researched through a flexible, multiple methods approach (Darbyshire, Macdougall & Schiller, 2010). Children were able to choose whether to answer direct questions in semi-structured interviews and / or engage in age-appropriate arts based methods (Mudaly & Goddard, 2006; Jager, 2010; Davies, Wright, Drake, & Bunting, 2009).
This paper offers an overview of the methodology and will illustrate emergent findings whilst drawing from the children’s own feedback about the methods used to engage them in this enquiry. The paper also seeks to explore what influences children’s perspectives especially in the light of a critical consideration about how power issues within the helping relationships (Aubrey & Dahl, 2006; Polvere, 2014) alongside the epistemological and ontological assumptions of child psychotherapy research (Midgley, Ansaldo, & Target, 2014) tend to shape children’s voices and agency.
