ABSTRACT Introduction Student well‐being is increasingly recognised as a significant concern in higher education. This paper considers this issue with reference to recently completed research conducted over seven years into the needs and potential support for counsellors, psychotherapists, and counselling psychologists during doctoral training. Method The paper is presented as a ‘meta‐synthesis’ (Paterson and Thorne 2003), whereby findings collected over seven years on both the experience of doctoral research and research supervision are reviewed and synthesised to generate new and expanded understandings. Results Drawing on findings from four primary research studies and four focus groups, we focus particularly on the fourth and final focus group, which explored themes leading to the proposed ‘relational 4C model’. In the initial stages, three Cs were identified to capture key themes in supervision: clarity, containment, and compassion. The introduction of collaboration as the fourth ‘C’ represents the central contribution of this paper. Discussion Our meta‐synthesis highlights the need to balance personal, unique factors with experiences linked to cultural identity, community contexts, and structural inequalities in research. We draw on an Ubuntu‐informed pedagogy to emphasise co‐agency, shared meaning‐making, and the disruption of hierarchical supervisory norms and traditional epistemic framings. Our focus group findings also highlighted that the original 3C model did not sufficiently attend to the question of organisational ontology, which is closely aligned with relational aims. The concept of ‘moral injury’ is introduced as a way of conceptualising and discussing these relational aims within an organisational framework that has sufficient capacity to support them.
Bager‐Charleson et al. (Tue,) studied this question.
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