Investigating Change: Compatible Research and Practice

The last century could be noted as an era of the emergence and rapid spread of postmodernism. The field of family therapy has not escaped its influences. During the last decade alternative approaches to family counselling emerged which emphasized multiple accounts of reality language as a venue for reality construction and primacy of social interaction. These recent changes have created a need for theoretically compatible research methodologies to study family therapy especially its postmodern offspring. Discourse analysis affords both practitioners and researchers a theoretically compatible methodology for understanding postmodern family therapies. Discourse analysis can be used to investigate how change and other phenomena are constructed or accomplished in the course of therapy. This methodology honors the interactive performance of family therapy and provides the details of discursive shifts to help therapists recognize and participate in conversational openings in their dialogue with clients. Moreover when therapists take a discursive stance the results of discursive research can beneficially inform their practice.