Purpose Memo

I wrote this memo to help me sort out how to proceed with chapter 3. Doesn't seem like a lot accomplished but it has involved a lot of thinking and is helping me to rewrite.


Purpose Memo 8-23-08


Goal
To establish an evidence base that will aid in understanding how to improve the experiences of infants and toddlers in the child welfare system. The guiding theoretical concept, rooted in psychoanalytic theory, is the parallel process in relationships. Psychoanalytic theory posits that people transfer feelings about significant figures from early life experiences to significant figures in the present (Seligman, 2001). Thus relationships from the past can influence current relationships. Continued research identified the parallel process through which relationships in the present influence one another. This process can be used deliberately, so that experiences in supervision can directly influence a direct service worker’s interactions with clients (Borders & Brown, 2005). It is likely that by providing professional development opportunities to CWWs that include attention to creating relationships for learning and that is experienced as useful, responsive and supportive, we can encourage CWWs to create helpful, responsive and supportive relationships with the infants and families on their caseloads.
In order to do this, we must understand what CWWs know about infant development, understand their experiences in working with infants and toddlers, and understand their perceptions of what sorts of professional development supports would be useful to them.
Study Purpose
To improve child welfare practice by generating deeper, broader and more inclusive understandings that are grounded in the complex experiences of working with maltreated infants and toddlers (Greene, 2007).
Purpose in Mixing Methods
1. Complementarity – Examine the same complex phenomenon, child welfare workers’ experiences with maltreated infants – by using methods that tap into different aspects of that experience. (Greene, 2007).
2. Initiation – To be alert for further research opportunities created by any “empirical puzzles” (Cook, cited in Greene, 2997) that arise if data results are divergent or dissonant.
References
Borders, E.D. & Brown, L.L.(2005). The new handbook of counseling supervision. Mahwah, NJ: Lahaska Press
Greene, J.(2007)/ Mixed methods in social inquiry. San Francisco: John Wiley and Sons
Seligman, L. (2001). Systems, strategies, and skills of counseling and psychotherapy. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice Hall.