“Getting On With It!”: Ensuring Safe and Compassionate Supervision and Thinking Spaces for Practitioners in Child Protection Practice

The research should consider the importance of facilitating a safe and compassionate culture of supervision and reflective practice within professional contexts of child protection practice. The emphasis is on the need for organisations to promote safer spaces for practitioners to express emotion and to reflect on their thoughts and feelings, in response to their practice in supporting victims of child abuse and neglect.

The intended qualitative research should focus on the challenges and the enabling factors in organisational safeguarding cultures in consultation with front line practitioners and their line managers/supervisors. These personal/professional narratives may offer critical insights on how to enhance safe and compassionate organisational cultures. Feminist pedagogy enables critical and insightful feminist perspectives on gender justice to challenge oppressive cultures (McCusker, 2017) in female dominated professions, where emotion and kindness can be seen as a professional deficit.

A critical examination of the need to ensure nurturing reflexive and resilient dispositions within practitioners, highlights the importance of this attribute to enhancing professional practice in supporting victims of abuse. Importantly, there is a recognition of the more troubling aspects of practice which silence or limit the authentic voice of the practitioner in expressions of sadness or anger within professional discussions and supervision. Bourdieu’s concept of the Field (Bourdieu, 1989a, McLoone-Richards, 2021) gives scope to appraise the implications for organisational culture in promoting reflective and resilient practitioners in advocating for their safe spaces within safer and emancipatory spaces in their professional contexts.

Application Process

To begin the application process please go to

https://www.worcester.ac.uk/courses/psychology-mphilphd and click on ‘How to Apply’ in the top menu. This PhD could be caried out on a part time or full time basis so please select the relevant application link. On the application form, please make it clear that you are applying for one of our advertised projects so we can direct it straight to the relevant people.

The Interview

All successful applicants will be offered an interview with the proposed Supervisory Team. You will be contacted by a member of the Research School Team to find a suitable date. Interviews can be conducted in person or over Microsoft Teams.

Funding your PhD

For information about Doctoral Loans please visit: https://www.worc.ac.uk/study/fees-and-finance/doctoral-loans.aspx

During your PhD you can access the Research Student Support Scheme to support dissemination costs associated with your research, up to £500 a year.

Research Group

Interpersonal Relationships & Wellbeing Research Group

The Interpersonal Relationships and Wellbeing Research Group draws together internationally renowned academics from across Psychology, Business and Criminology, with partners in Industry, third sector organisations and local government. Research activity is organised around four themes: Wellbeing for Life; Customer Interactions; People and Work; and Trauma and Violence Prevention.

We study interpersonal relationships, wellbeing and their inter-connectivity from an inter-disciplinary perspective, to generate applied, solution-focussed research. Our research explores how individual, social and environmental factors influence relationships and wellbeing within different contexts, such as in workplaces, schools and online spaces. We are interested in understanding how interpersonal relationships contribute to mental health (construed as both trauma/mental ill-health, and as wellbeing) and how they shape individual and team behaviour in consumer and organizational settings. In doing so, we explore both the ‘dark’ and ‘light’ side of relationships and human behaviour more broadly.

Widening Participation

As part of its mission statement the University is committed to widening participation for its higher degrees. Although most candidates will have an undergraduate and/or a Masters degree, the University is happy to accept applications from candidates with relevant professional qualifications and work related experience.

Director of Studies:

Dr Claire McLoone-Richards, (Senior Lecturer, Chair of Trauma and Violence Prevention Research Group) Interpersonal Relationships and Wellbeing Research Group, School of Psychology, University of Worcester

Supervisors:

Dr Jackie Bentley, (Senior Lecturer, Department of Pre-Registration Nursing) Interpersonal Relationships and Wellbeing Research Group, Three Counties School of Nursing and Midwifery, University of Worcester

Dr Carla Solvason (Senior Lecturer, Department of Children and Families) Interpersonal Relationships and Wellbeing Research Group, Institute of Education, University of Worcester.

Research Group: Interpersonal Relationships and Wellbeing Research Group

For further information or an informal discussion on this project, please contact Dr Claire McLoone-Richards (Director of Studies) via email at c.richards@worc.ac.uk