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This paper uses critical realism to identify mechanisms that activate successful relationships. It draws data from a longitudinal, mixed‐methods study of youth who used multiple services. It examines functionality of four relational mechanisms: power, recognition, responsiveness and mutuality that lead to positive change and explores the implications of these for practice with youth with complex needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In academic and practitioner literature, codes of ethics are generally understood to act as a mechanism guiding and ensuring ethical behaviour. However, this premise has not yet been thoroughly explored. Using a qualitative research approach this study examines the tools used in ethical decision-making by New Zealand marketing research practitioners, with a focus on client relationships. Participants reported on their awareness, familiarity, and use of professional and organisational codes of ethics. In particular, information was sought on how ethical issues were dealt with when they arose in their relationships with clients. This empirical research focused on the effects of different variables and emerging constructs, and the interplay between them, on ethical decisionmaking in client relationships. The paper concludes with a discussion of research contributions, implications for the practice of marketing research, and future research opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a conceptual framework in music therapy with adults with severe and profound levels of intellectual disability. Drawing from Carl Rogers' person-centered work and his notion of the good life as a direction, the author presents four core relational experiences (curiosity, invitation, celebration, and recognition) that underpin the therapeutic process with this client population. Case vignettes from the author's clinical work illustrate how core experiences are presented through improvisational musical experiences. Considerations are given to the clinical significance of good-life-oriented experiences on the emotional health of individuals with severe and profound intellectual disability, and to its implications beyond the music therapy space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music therapy school consultation, according to Rickson (2010), is a process in which a music therapist aims to empower team members to use music in an on-going way with students who have special education needs. However, while consultation is primarily an indirect activity, direct interaction between therapist and student continues to be important for modelling strategies and techniques, and highlighting students' strengths. This paper describes student responses to the direct interaction that took place between the music therapist and students as part of a music therapy school consultation in a mainstream city school in New Zealand. The music therapist, who is also the first author, worked with four students and their respective teams over the period of one week. Each team included a teachers' aide, parent and classroom teacher. Follow-up interviews undertaken by an independent researcher, who is the second author, suggest the adults involved were unsure of what to expect of the consultation, and some had reservations about how the students might respond. However, in all cases students engaged relatively easily with the music therapist and, according to team members, each demonstrated higher than usual levels of participation during music therapy activities. Team members therefore developed an increased awareness of the potential benefits of music therapist and student interaction, as well as musical ideas that they might use in their on-going daily interactions with students to help further educational outcomes. In this paper, four contrasting case vignettes describe the complexity of student needs and goals, and demonstrate how the music therapist, in her direct interactions with students, was able to draw on a variety of therapeutic strategies and techniques to illicit the positive responses of the students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on the findings of the qualitative phase of a New Zealand longitudinal study on vulnerable young people’s transitions to adulthood. The young people were aged between 12 and 17 years at the time of the first interview. The paper focuses on one key finding, how youth enact agency through their relationships with significant others: families, social workers, teachers and care workers. These youth had experienced sustained exposure to harm including abuse, violence, addictions, disengagement from school and mental health issues. The qualitative interviews focused on young people’s experiences with services (child welfare, juvenile justice, mental health and education support services) their key transitions, and the strategies they used to locate support and resources. The thematic analysis of the interviews indicated that a search for agency was a central motif in young people’s experiences. This was reflected in three thematic clusters: making sense of the world, having a voice and acting on the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous voices and perspectives are necessary in advancing applied and global sport psychology. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori sport and exercise professionals are thriving despite existing systems that devalue, discriminate and exclude Māori from fulfilling their potential. This qualitative study investigated the perspectives of ten Māori sport and exercise experts including academics, allied health professionals, athletes, coaches and Māori healers in order to develop a critical understanding of their work related experiences and analyze the diverse forms of knowledge on which they draw. Participants-collaborators were interviewed using an insider research design to facilitate discussion about their current work. Results support a "space between" model and suggest that Māori sport and exercise work enables excellence in sport performance while also meeting holistic wellbeing needs of communities. Māori exercise professionals identified that their presence in their respective fields "speaks back" to racist practices and entrenched barriers that colonize Māori success. Further, applying holistic notions of wellbeing and ancestral knowledge to sport and exercise was seen as default and ordinary; shifting the illusion that sport and exercise operates in a culture-less, timeless and physical vacuum. From an applied and Indigenous perspective, these results emphasize that Indigenous sport leadership and practices are unequaled by Western methods and science alone. Māori exercise professionals demonstrate cultural innovation and intersectionality that not only revolutionizes sport, but brings with it essential community wellbeing. Lay summary: This article explores the experiences of ten Māori exercise professionals and analyses the diverse forms of knowledge they draw on in their work. The study provides insight into how Māori exercise professionals utilize their knowledge of social contexts and culture, in turn expanding the scope of sport and exercise psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As health-related mobile apps have proliferated in recent years in USA and Australia, counsellor opinions were solicited to aid development of therapeutic apps. After being informed of the therapeutic potential of time and location-based reminders, 33 drug and alcohol counsellors from New Zealand and Australia answered an anonymous online survey. Counsellors were willing to use timed and location based reminders to assist clients with their sobriety, but were concerned about running costs. Less experienced counsellors may be less willing to use mobile technology therapeutically. Counsellors could be willing to use location services on mobile phones therapeutically, but training may be required to address concerns about privacy and the ability to engage with clients about their spatial and temporal vulnerabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non‐consumer researchers collaborating with consumer researchers can benefit from greater relevance of research and improved congruence between research processes and health policy. As with all research collaborations, such partnerships are both constrained and facilitated by research ecosystems. However, it seems that collaborations with consumer researchers are impacted in particular ways by the research ecosystem. Drawing on ecological systems theory, this study aims to improve understandings of how ecological structures impact collaborations between non‐consumer and consumer researchers. Interviews were conducted with 11 non‐consumer researchers from a range of mental health disciplines about their experiences collaborating with consumer researchers. One theme developed through analysis of the data set related to the research ecosystem. Data from this theme were extracted and discursively analysed using the principles of discursive psychology. Findings emphasize distinct factors that influence collaborations at each level of the ecosystem, encompassing both local research culture and broader research systems. Findings suggest that external pressures (such as deadlines for funding applications, or bureaucratic processes) from the broader ecosystemic levels need to be challenged at the local collaboration level. Non‐consumer researchers might support collaborations through, for instance, working to create enhanced flexibility in research timelines, or making time for relationship building, thus fostering more meaningful collaborations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: The counselling relationship is important for engaging young people, but more understanding about how young people experience this in the context of school counselling is necessary. This study explored young people's understanding of the counselling relationship in two New Zealand schools. Method: Twenty‐two participants between the ages of 16 and 18 took part in unstructured narrative interviews on their experience of school counselling. The data were analysed to identify themes related specifically to participants' experience of the counselling relationship. Findings: Five themes highlighting positive aspects of the relationship with the school counsellor were identified; young people's experiences of a genuine connection with a counsellor, the experience of being listened to, availability and accessibility of the counsellor on site at school, the counsellor's belief in the young person and the counsellor's potential to be an advocate for the young person in the school context. Negative experiences of the counselling relationship were described in the absence of these features. Conclusions and implications for practice: The "School counsellor" has the potential to be experienced as a "refuge" for young people in the context of a hierarchical and evaluative school environment, within which they can feel accepted, understood and safe. Accessibility and the counsellor's ability to serve as an advocate in the school context means school counselling can be an important primary care intervention for young people in distress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The provision of community-based child welfare services (CCW) in a managerialist climate in Aotearoa New Zealand (ANZ) necessitates constantly renegotiated contractual partnerships, service targeting and measured outcomes. Reflective supervision is essential to counter the perceived negative impacts of managerialism on CCW work. Within this environment, there is a struggle to ensure supervision provides reflective spaces for social workers to develop in their work with service users despite the demands of meeting organisational imperatives. This article reports on a qualitative study which critically analyses the espoused theory and theories-in-use [Argyris, C., & Schön, D. (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.] about reflective supervision held by social workers practising in the demanding environment of CCW. In the first phase of the research reported here, nine key informants who had both considerable experience in CCW and academic experience in ANZ were interviewed about the nature of reflective supervision in CCW social work. Findings indicate that social workers working in CCW settings are influenced by factors associated with self-awareness, relationships, organisational and professional obligations within a changing and risk-averse managerial environment. Key informants assert that social workers from CCW backgrounds need reflective supervision to engage in self-reflection, consider wider socio-cultural factors and to critically develop social-justice-informed practice with service users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the relationship between the identity of social work and the neoliberal political project. Reference is made to a small but carefully structured quantitative research study in Auckland, New Zealand which examined the knowledge applied and produced in the practice of social work. This study found evidence consistent with Philp’s [(1979). Notes on the form of knowledge in social work.Sociological Review,27(1), 83–111] theorisation of a specific ‘form of knowledge’ for social work which is produced and reproduced as a function of relational engagement between social workers and those who are constructed as ‘clients’ in an unequal society. This discourse casts the ‘failing subject’ as socially located and inherently redeemable in direct contrast to populist neoliberal constructions of personal responsibility and moral deficit. With reference to dialectical theory it is suggested that this resilient discourse, embedded in ‘every-day’ practice, is inevitably a source of resistance to the imposition of neoliberal practice and policy design. This resistance provides hope for the progressive voice of social work in the current contest of ideas in relation to the future development of social work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examined commonalities in adolescents' priorities for engagement with psychological support in the context of contemporary youth culture in New Zealand. These were explored across a range of different services including a face-to-face hospital-based mental health service, a face-to-face school-based counseling service, a telephone counseling service and a new form of counseling using mobile phone text. Interviews were conducted with 63 young people aged 13-18 who had used at least one of these services. A thematic analysis identified that there were common priorities for participants across the different services including their need to keep control; not to have their parents involved; to have a relationship with a counselor which was more like a friendship than a professional relationship; to talk freely and be listened to; and to have the service be accessible and flexible enough to fit around their lives. Text and telephone counseling were seen to be particularly appropriate for meeting some of these needs. Professionals working with young people should consider offering a suite of options for psychological support, allowing young people to balance their different needs and priorities and thus facilitate their engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the clinical supervision experiences of early-career mental health professionals who were working in their first year as social workers and occupational therapists. As part of their employment, concurrently they were studying towards a postgraduate certificate in mental health. Using a qualitative research approach guided by themes in the clinical supervision literature, individual semi-structured interviews were undertaken with twelve clinical supervisees. Five themes were found in the participant narratives. The relationship in clinical supervision was the most important feature of what clinical supervisees valued about their clinical supervision. This relationship was seen by the clinical supervisees as a way of maintaining their professional effectiveness with clients and col leagues within the hospital context by addressing personal responses and providing guidance. The clinical supervisory relationship was valued by supervisees as it identified gaps in training, directed career development, and provided checks on caseload and work/life balance. Lastly, the clinical supervisees discussed clinical supervision as encouraging self-care and referral to support and resources when critical incidents were encountered on the job. The implications for clinical supervision in mental health social work are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paid caregivers possess an essential role in home care services. However, recruitment and retention issues are extensive within this workforce, largely in relation to poor working conditions. This article primarily focuses on the qualitative data extracted from a large randomised controlled trial in New Zealand and is supported by some quantitative findings. The aim was to explore paid caregiver perceptions of a restorative home care intervention in comparison with usual home care. The purpose of the qualitative exploration was to gather rich descriptive data that highlight differences between the two services with an emphasis on the workforce viewpoint. Four focus groups were undertaken with paid caregivers, two at baseline (4 and 5 participants in the control and intervention groups, respectively) and two at 14 months (eight participants in each focus group). Focus group data were collected in December 2005 and February 2007. A general inductive approach was used to analyse focus group transcripts. Two themes emerged from both the control and intervention focus groups: relationship with older people and issues with home care service delivery. A further two themes were pertinent to the intervention group: job satisfaction and preintervention. Findings revealed the intervention had a substantial positive impact on paid caregiver job satisfaction in comparison with usual care. This appeared to be due to improved training, increased support and supervision, and more flexibility. The intervention resulted in positive changes from the paid caregiver perspective and substantially reduced turnover in comparison with usual home care. However, both groups identified the need for further improvements to their working conditions. In addition, the need to regulate this vulnerable workforce is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore the historical background and context to the theoretical eclecticism described by the participants interviewed for a research study. The initial aim was to test the relevance of the vicarious traumatisation (vt) or vt literature with a group of sexual abuse therapists. The participants interviewed were all working as sexual abuse therapists in group and individual practices, many of whom worked in the field before there were well articulated theories of trauma assessment and treatment in the 1970s and 1980s. With the available theory, they actively developed their own unique frameworks for practice and became pioneers in the field. The findings of this research suggest that the practitioners' reference to diverse sources of theory is both a resource and protective factor which, when synthesised, is drawn upon to support the day-to-day work of sexual abuse therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]