The Psychological Battle for Control: A Qualitative Study of Health-care Professionals' Understandings of the Treatment of Anorexia Nervosa

✍ Scribed by MARIA JARMAN; JONATHAN A. SMITH; SUE WALSH

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 179 KB
• Volume: 7
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1052-9284
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-1298(199704)7:2<137::aid-casp404>3.0.co;2-g

✦ Synopsis

This paper reports a qualitative, idiographic study, which intensively examines a multidisciplinary team of clinicians' subjective understandings and experiences of treating young people with anorexia nervosa. The study employs semi-structured interviews and interpretative phenomenological analysis, these methods enabling individual clinicians' perspectives to be explored in depth and retained within the analysis. The analysis focuses on the salient higher-order theme of control which emerges as central to understanding the treatment of the anorexic child. Three control-related themes are used to illustrate the multiplicity of meanings and experiences which are relevant to this team of health-care professionals. It is suggested that this paper makes three important contributions to the current eating disorder literature: illuminating the multi-faceted nature of the construct control; highlighting the importance of therapists' subjective understandings and experiences; and illustrating the value of qualitative methods for clinically relevant research.