24 research outputs found
Healing through culturally embedded practice: an investigation of counsellors’ and clients’ experiences of Buddhist Counselling in Thailand
This thesis is concerned with an exploration of counsellors’ and clients’ lived experiences of
Buddhist Counselling, an indigenous Buddhist-based counselling approach in Thailand. Over
the past decade, Buddhist Counselling has received a growing interest from Thai counselling
trainees and practitioners, and it has also expanded to serve Thai people in various settings.
Research on Buddhist Counselling is very limited and most of the existing studies in the
field have focused on measuring the effectiveness of the approach. While these studies have
consistently indicated the positive effects of Buddhist Counselling on psychological
improvement across several population groups, the significant questions of how Buddhist
Counselling brings about such outcome and how it is experienced are still largely
unanswered. Moreover, existing research is concentrated much more on clients’ views than
counsellors’ views, although counsellors’ views of their counselling practice can also serve as
a knowledge base of the field. This thesis thus sets out to contribute to rectifying this
omission by exploring Buddhist Counselling from the perspectives of both counsellors and
clients.
The thesis is based on two qualitative studies. The first study addressed Buddhist
Counselling from the perspective of five counsellors through a focus group and semi-structured
interviews. The second study explored Buddhist Counselling from the perspective
of three clients, using two semi-structured interviews with each of them. All data received
were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA).
The study reveals counsellors’ and clients’ overall positive experience of engaging in
Buddhist Counselling. Central to the accounts of the counsellors are the following
perceptions: that their practice of Buddhist Counselling is culturally congruent with the
existing values and beliefs of both themselves and their clients; that their personal and
professional congruence is key to their therapeutic efficacy; and that they enhance such
congruence through their application of Buddhist ideas and practices in their daily lives. Key
to the clients’ accounts is their emphasis on the significant roles of the counsellors’ Buddhist
ideas and personal qualities, and of their religious practices in facilitating healing and change.
Key shared findings from both studies reveal that the participants’ accounts of their cultural
background and their experiences of Buddhist Counselling are intertwined. Adopting
hermeneutics to address this intertwinement, I reveal the cultural and moral dimensions
underlying the practice of Buddhist Counselling. Based on such revelation, I suggest that
Buddhist Counselling in particular, as well as psychotherapy in general, should be better
understood as a historically situated, culturally bound, and morally constituted activity of
people who are concerned with improving the quality of their lives and their community,
rather than the transcultural and merely relational work of morally-neutral practitioners
Perceived Relationships with Parents and Paranoid Delusions: Comparisons of Currently Ill, Remitted and Normal Participants
Understanding visibility in Iron Age and Roman southern Spain with exponential random graph models for visibility networks
Long-term changes in visibility patterns between urban settlements are considered an important factor for understanding Iron Age II settlement locations in Southern Spain. From some settlements, the surrounding landscape and other settlements could be visually controlled, and some settlements are argued to be intervisible to allow for communication through visual signals. However, the study of how these visibility patterns changed in the subsequent Roman period in this region is largely ignored. In this paper, we argue that visibility might still have structured interactions between communities in Roman times and should not be dismissed out of hand merely because more and other data sources are available as compared to the Iron Age. However, the way in which it affected human behaviour might have been different in Roman times as compared to the Iron Age. We argue that simulating archaeologists’ hypotheses about the emergence of inter-settlement visibility is a promising way of understanding such differences. To do this, we use exponential random graph modelling (ERGM), a statistical network simulation modelling technique that allows us to simulate hypotheses about the emergence and long-term change of visibility networks. We combine this approach with an exploratory analysis of the observed visibility networks between identified urban settlements, which will reveal similarities and differences in the changing patterns of visibility networks through time. The results of the ERGMs are then compared with the changes in the observed network structure. We conclude that our knowledge of the changes from the Iron Age II to the Roman settlement pattern suggests only gradual changes in the role of visibility in structuring inter-settlement interactions, possibly followed by a disintegration of the visibility network after the Roman Early Imperial period