SPR2017 Toronto: panel on Building Bridges with Cases

Submitted by Jochem on May 12, 2017 in announcement

On 23 June, Jochem Willemsen will chair a panel at the 48th international meeting of the Society for Psychotherapy Research in Toronto. The topic of the panel is approaches to synthesizing findings from case studies. Clinical case studies have high ecological validity and provide context-based knowledge, but have limited generalizability. As the number of published case studies is increasing (Desmet et al., 2013), there is a need to think about approaches to bring together insights from case studies. Meta-synthesis (aka qualitative meta-analysis) is a method developed in health sciences for synthesizing insights derived from qualitative studies. Iwakabe and Gazzola (2009) have proposed to apply this method to psychotherapy case studies, and a limited number of such studies have been conducted in recent years (Iwakabe, 2016; Rabinovich & Kacen, 2009; Widdowson, 2016; Willemsen et al., 2015). In this panel, researchers/clinicians who have used the method of meta-synthesis will compare their experiences. The panel will end with a critical reflection on the strengths, limitations, good practices, and the potential of meta-synthesis as a method in the field of case study research. Panelists are Shigeru Iwakabe, Merav Rabinovich, Jochem Willemsen and John McLeod (discussant). More information can be found here: http://www.sprconference.com/

meta-synthesis, qualitative research, clinical case study, generalization, therapy integration,