"You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem" : exploring the view of practitioners from a local authority educational psychology service, of a socio-political approach within UK educational psychology

Empirical literature on educational psychologists’ (EPs) views of socio-political or critical community psychology (CCP) focuses on single-issue aspects of oppression such as sexuality or racism. Some research examined EPs’ views of psychology from a broader ideological perspective, examining individualism, neo-liberal austerity, colonialist practices within educational psychology, and social justice. Having identified a gap in the empirical literature; research was modelled on Thompson (2007), with an emancipatory aim of contributing to EPs’ socio-political conscientisation. Critical realist-based, discursive, Q-methodology involved 16 UK local authority EP service participants ranking 51 expertly updated socio-political statements by relevance to the future of EP practice. Following three-Factor resolution from Factor analysis, interpretation was supported by qualitative data. Findings were considered theoretically and alongside current literature, deriving practice implications. Research limitations and possible future research were discussed. The aim was to contribute to addressing Fox’s (2005) hypothesis that UK EPs do not appreciate, or know how to respond to, socio-politically rooted suffering and so risk colluding with a non-emancipatory status-quo. In conclusion, the EP practitioner group viewed CCP ideas as highly relevant but varied in their responses to them such that the three core discourses derived in factorisation mapped onto the areas of mainstream psychology, mainstream community psychology, and critical community psychology.