Introduction

The authors are delighted to welcome you, the reader, to this book on qualitative research in psychotherapy. The book comprises 14 chapters on different forms of or approaches to qualitative research as used in or applied to researching psychotherapy. While the authors focus on research into the practice of psychotherapy, they are aware that, for practitioners in different countries, there is considerable overlap between the practice and discipline of psychotherapy and that of counselling and of clinical and counselling psychology and they are delighted that the contributors to this volume represent these different disciplines of the psychological therapies. The authors are also delighted that theirs has been a collaboration, primarily between their two universities—those of Auckland University of Technology (AUT) in Aotearoa New Zealand (with five colleagues contributing four chapters) and the University of Edinburgh (UoE) in Scotland (with five colleagues contributing five chapters), together with another four authors from elsewhere who are affiliated with the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry at the UoE—and the authors hope that this marks the beginning of further exchange and future collaborations between them. In a final chapter, they offer their own reflections on the contributions and the volume as a whole.