Towards facilitating client change: an IPA study based on lived experiences of clients, trainees and supervisors.

Background: Investigating change as a result of therapy and the underlying processes that contribute to a change has been a central research topic over the years. This thesis uses qualitative methods, specifically meta-ethnography (Noblit and Hare, 1988) and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA; Smith et al., 2009) to examine the lived experiences of clients, trainees and supervisors from counselling psychology and various professional psychotherapy programmes. Aim: The aim was to investigate the experience of processes involved in facilitating client change and the production of positive therapeutic outcomes for clients. Results: Therapy outcome and client change is a complicated process that differs based on client, therapist, the therapeutic relationship, supervisors and various other external factors. Clients, therapists and supervisors constructed their own responses and shared what is important to them so as to establish a link between process and outcome. Opportunities and challenges that training programmes can examine and adopt aiming at preparing counselling and psychotherapy trainees to focus on client change processes are discussed.