Family therapy has made a considerable contribution to our understanding of the experiences of children and families and especially how various symptoms can be understood as their response to distressing family dynamics. Though family therapy has found ways of alleviating children's distress we still know relatively little about how children experience the process of family therapy. Such knowledge is important for ethical as well as pragmatic reasons -to be able to offer a more sensitive and effective experience. This paper reports a study employing qualitative methods whereby children were interviewed about their experience of family therapy. Semistructured interviews were conducted after family therapy sessions, and children were invited to recall what they perceived to be helpful and unhelpful. Helpful events or moments were then identified and replayed on the videotape of the sessions to assist children's memory. The results suggest a diversity of experiences according to the children's ages, gender and role in the family. Some common assumptions were challenged by the findings, for example, that some children preferred more directive and focused aspects of the therapy, rather than systemic questions which could inspire feelings of confusion and inadequacy.

It is argued that current attempts to investigate the process of family therapy might benefit from the application of discursive and narrativc analytic techniques. An example of such an analysis is given, Laking the work of an expericnced family therapist with one family seeking help in dealing with the aftermath o f a marital separation. 'Thc theme of'how to deal with change' as i t materializes in the discussions during therapy is selected for detailed examination in this paper. It is argued that thcre are two main discourses on this theme evident in the family's discussions, one being that the separation has occurred and its consequences should now he left to arise naturally; the other being that the effects of thr separation need to be actively managed. It is suggested that this analytic procedure can dramatize the subtle changes in family discourses during therapy; its limitations in terms of generalizability, and the dificulties of dealing with huge amounts of complex material, are also noted.

We describe the application of discursive analysis to the task of researching family therapy process. Through the analysis of a central theme in two family therapy treatments, we found that individual family members move to using a wider range of discourses on the central theme by the end of therapy. Using the example of one family's therapy sessions, we examine how the therapist contributes to the new meanings and views that emerge, and present our analysis of the therapists' interventions in relation to the 'production' of these alternative meanings. It is argued that discourse analysis can fruitfully be applied to family therapy process research and could contribute to theoretical concepts of change and therapeutic competence.