Toward the Identification of Variables for Evaluating Family Therapy Workshops*

Abstract

If the field of family therapy is to improve the quality of its continuing education, a useful measurement of workshop quality must be developed. In a preliminary step towards this goal, 14 expert subjects from the field of family therapy were interviewed to identify variables and relationships that can be hypothesized to influence the quality–as assessed by participants–of family therapy workshops. This paper reports the opinions of the subjects, using counts and quotations to convey as much of the raw information as space allows, and presents the methods through which the information was organized by the authors into four categories and 58 (assumed to be interdependent) variables.

Family Therapy and Qualitative Research*

“…Discovery-oriented qualitative research can also be used to answer questions about training and supervision issues. For example, a recent qualitative study examined the ingredients necessary for "excellent" family therapy workshops (Heath, McKenna, & Atkinson, 1988). Using reputational-case selection, these family therapy researchers chose 14 experts for indepth interviews.…”