To members of Constellation Talk,
I am entering the research phase of my Ph.D. program and am beginning to
formulate the direction of my dissertation. The text below is a summary
of my initial concepts. I am expecting that the members of our group
with support me with feedback, guidance and might also participate
directly in the research, as described below.
The aim of my dissertation is to provide the professional and scholarly
communities with both an introduction to the principles of Constellation
work and a credible piece of research to suggest its promise as a form
of treatment.
When I facilitate a constellation for a client, very often the immediate
and short-term results are extraordinary. Since the process is a single
session intervention and I am not a psychotherapist, I do not maintain
an ongoing relationship with the clients. However, I generally contact
them 4-6 weeks afterwards for feedback on their experience and whether
the presenting issue has shifted. The responses have been remarkable
and consistent with the results obtained by other professional
practitioners worldwide in thousands of constellations conducted over
the past 10 years.
However, there are no credible English-language outcome studies to
independently confirm these results. For my dissertation, I am
intending to pursue this question: Do clients who participate in a
constellation process show improvements in their presenting issues after
one year?
My research study as currently envisioned would be to establish a
protocol to test the longitudinal impact of constellations on clients
suffering from acute grief. I would solicit participation with a number
of constellation practitioners from the U.S. and Australia. They would
offer a constellation workshop to members of a pre-existing group, such
as a church, hospice or hospital bereavement group for widows and
widowers. We would use an established instrument scale to measure grief
prior to the workshop and again in the future, say 6-weeks and 6-months
afterwards. We could also test a control cohort of members of the
bereavement group who do not participate in the constellation work. The
data would be analyzed to isolate changes in the grief scale that can be
ascribed to participation in the constellation. An alternative or
supplement, we could work from a case study perspective to collect
subjective interview data from the participants.
My first question is what type of research methodology is most
appropriate at this stage? A randomized controlled trial is considered
the "gold standard" for judging clinical treatments. However, it may be
premature to attempt this at the outset. There is a progression from
case study, to pilot study to randomized controlled study. Also, since
I do not expect to receive grant support, I need to formulate a question
and methodology that fits within an unfunded dissertation.
Another question involves the suitability of using traumatic grief as a
presenting symptom for studying the effects of the Constellation
process. As with most therapies, Constellations can be used for a broad
range of symptoms and conditions. I am targeting grief for two reasons:
first, as an existential therapy, Systemic Constellations deal directly
with healing relationships between the living and dead. Second,
traumatic grief seems to be a concrete and measurable condition that
does not ordinarily yield to conventional psychotherapy and medication.
Can traumatic grief can be segregated and studied on its own?
I look forward to working together with you to bring these ideas to
fruition.
Dan
