A qualitative study on how therapists negotiate gendered perceptions of the division of parental responsibility and labour, using a story completion and vignette task

Wahnon, Marta

Abstract

Aims: The argument that therapeutic practice affirms a reductionist paradigm of distress and overlooks socio-environmental understandings of suffering suggests that Psychology may collude with systems of power, privilege, and oppression. As key proponents of social justice it is critical that Counselling Psychologists add to the literature exploring this. This thesis employed a scenario depicting a couple’s distress over divisions of parental labour, to explore the dominant discourses that therapeutic practitioners draw upon in formulating a situation of distress situated in a socio-environmental context.

Methods: A combination of story completion (SC) and vignette stimuli were used to obtain qualitative data in this study, from forty-three practitioners qualified in an integrative therapeutic approach. Using a constructionist thematic analysis three themes were identified: 1) the recreation of gender roles, 2) the motherhood penalty and 3) reformulating distress.

Findings: Therapeutic practitioners drew on two overarching discourses across their stories: heteronormative and biomedical. The dominant story type across the dataset reaffirmed these dominant regulatory, whilst a ‘secondary’ or less common story type simultaneously challenged the dominant rhetoric.
Implications: The thesis provides evidence that therapists reaffirm and challenge reductionist paradigms of distress, thus engaging in a complex reproduction/subversion of dominant cultural discourses. Importantly, the results highlight that therapists are influenced by the same stereotypes as everyone else and remind us that psychology as a profession rest upon a set of social practices with implications beyond those which we are immediately aware of.
The discussion inquires into the discipline’s current stance on the intersection between models of human suffering and social justice. Furthermore, this work highlights opportunities posed by transposing the locus of change from the individual to wider contexts, aiding a more realistic assessment of therapeutic change and nudging the discipline into greater alignment and coherence with the social justice narrative (Woodger, 2020). Clinical implications, limitations and avenues for future research are also discussed.

Citation

Wahnon, M. A qualitative study on how therapists negotiate gendered perceptions of the division of parental responsibility and labour, using a story completion and vignette task. (Thesis). University of the West of England. Retrieved from https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10198589

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Dec 2, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 14, 2023
• Keywords: story completion, social justice, counselling psychology, division of parenting responsibilities, constructionist thematic analysis, psychotherapy
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10198589
• Award Date: Jul 14, 2023