This thesis explores mental health nurses’ and midwives’ experiences of supervision.
The thesis aims to create a partial and situated understanding of the numerous factors
which contribute to practitioners’ experiences of supervision. In particular the thesis
investigates the disciplinary context within which supervision takes place, moving
from the experiences of individual practitioners to compare and contrast supervision
within two distinct professional disciplines which have common areas of interest.
Existing research on the topic of supervision in mental health nursing and midwifery
tends to reify the concept of supervision. Supervision is assumed to be beneficial,
and there is a focus on investigating the effects of supervision without an
accompanying understanding of why, how, where and by whom supervision is done.
In this thesis, ‘supervision’ is critically conceptualised as indicating a cluster of
context-specific practices, and the investigation of supervision is located with the
practitioner’s understandings and experiences.
The theoretical perspective of the thesis is informed by social constructionism, and
‘experience’ is conceptualised as communicated through meaning-making narratives.
The experiences of the study participants were accessed through the collection of
data in the form of narratives. Sixteen participants were recruited, comprising eight
mental health nurses and eight midwives. Each participant was interviewed once,
using a semi-structured interview format. The analysis was influenced by the
theories of Gee (1991), Bruner (1986) and Ricoeur (1983/1984), and employed a
narrative approach in which the unique meaning-making qualities of narrative were
used to interpret the data. The analysis paid close attention to the process of
fragmentation and configuration of the data, and produced four composite stories
which presented the findings in a holistic and contextualised form.
Two themes were identified from the findings: Supervision and Emotions, and
Supervision and The Profession, and these were discussed in the light of the two
professional contexts explored, and with reference to supervision as an exercise of
power. The theme of Emotions recognises the integral role played by emotions in
both clinical practice and supervision, and conceptualises supervision and the
organisational context as emotional ecologies. Supervision can be constructed as a
special emotional ecology with its own feeling rules, and this can both benefit and
harm the practitioner. The theme of The Profession responds to the importance of
the professional context of supervision practices, and the role of discourses about
professional identity and status in determining how supervision is done and with
what aim.
Comparing supervision practices within two different disciplinary contexts enabled
this thesis to challenge tropes about supervision. Supervision cannot be assumed to
be either ‘good’ or ‘punitive’, and practices are constructed in the light of particular
aims and expectations. This thesis also makes the methodological argument that
research into supervision must be politicised and theorised and accommodate
contextualised complexity. To simplify or decontextualise the exploration of
supervision is to lose the details of practice which make supervision what it is.
Supervision is a complex process, enmeshed in its context, and may be constructed to
serve different purposes