Developing clinical supervision research through reasoned analogies with therapy

Something about the increasingly important business of clinical supervision ‘does not compute’ (Watkins, 1997, p. 604). The paradox is that supervision has never been so strongly endorsed as the mainstay of professional development (in both initial training and CPD), yet we know so surprisingly little about it (Ellis, Ladany, Krengel, & Schult, 1996). Consequently, we tend to base our supervision on how we ourselves were supervised, or on our approach to therapy (Falender and Shafranske, 2005). As part of the rationale for a research programme intended to address this paradox, a systematic analogy is drawn between therapy and supervision, with clinical psychology taken as an example. This indicates how therapy and supervision overlap, allowing key parallels to be defined, such as the shared emphasis on a problem-solving approach, founded on a working alliance. Of particular potential value, this can lead to the identification of relevant models and methodologies that have shown promise in the relatively sophisticated therapy literature, and which might therefore aid research into supervision. Examples are provided and implications drawn for future attempts at drawing promising analogies and for developing research into clinical supervision.