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This article presents an analysis of the interactions between gender and class in the career pathways of social workers practising as counsellors and psychotherapists. Gender is one of the strong patterns found in the empirical data generated by a qualitative study of the professional identity of practitioners in social work. Gender was found to have a strong influence on the career choices made by men and women in social work. Women in the sample have pursued career directions that continue to have a strong clinical focus, combined with other roles such as management, supervision and training. They are more likely to express the need to balance their working lives with the needs of their families. Men are more likely to single‐mindedly pursue careers in management and to express feelings of responsibility to provide for their families once children are born. However, the analysis of data also found that men were more likely to identify their family origins as working class, while women identify their family backgrounds as middle class. This patterning shows the complex interactions between gender and class in determining life outcomes. These differential pathways and work preferences need to be recognised and addressed to work towards more equitable outcomes for practitioners within social work, so that structural disadvantages on the basis of gender and class are challenged rather than replicated.

Child sexual abuse in Papua New Guinea is a human rights issue as well as an indicator of HIV risk in women. This study aimed to develop knowledge about the link between violence experienced by women and their HIV status. The study used a mixed method approach to collect quantitative and qualitative data through structured interviews with a sample of 415 women across four provinces of Papua New Guinea: National Capital District, Western Highlands, Western, and Morobe. Participants were asked about violence they had experienced as children and in their adult relationships and the impact of the violence. The quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS, and qualitative data was coded using a thematic approach. Child sexual abuse was reported by 27.5% of the sample (n = 114). Women reporting child sexual abuse were more likely to live in violent relationships, be HIV positive, and have a higher number of sexual partners.

Counsellors and psychotherapists bring unique knowledge to the field of research about the necessity for empathic connection to access participants’ lived experience, and about the co‐construction of knowledge by participant and researcher. The current study formed part of a broader study of the professional identity of social workers as counsellors and psychotherapists and the development of their practice‐based wisdom. Specifically, this study explored social workers’ narratives about critical incidents in their practice with particular reference to analysing the emotional experience of practitioners and the emotional response of the researcher. The sample comprised 18 clinical social workers who practised as therapists. They were purposively selected from professional associations and networks. Two semi‐structured one‐hour interviews were conducted with each participant, using professional biography and critical incident interviewing techniques. Interviews were transcribed, coded, and analysed using the NVivo software program, which facilitates a grounded theory qualitative analysis. The findings presented are from analysis of two participants’ interviews, which yielded rich emotional content in relation to both participant and researcher. The study concludes that revealing the researcher's identificatory processes, resulting from participants’ narratives, leads to a more truthful and accountable description of data collection and analysis in qualitative research and highlights how the researcher co‐constructs the data during data collection and analysis. This article advocates accepting subjectivity as an inevitable aspect of research and argues for the need to write subjectivity into research reports.