The benefits of Play therapy for children with traumatic illness
The benefits of Play therapy for children with traumatic illness
The course session on research will enable you to include relevant material in your essay. The main part of the half- day course session will be a short presentation by each participant with an accompanying group discussion and critique. You will need to spend an adequate amount of time beforehand to do yourself justice. The slot for each participant will be between 15 and 30 minutes, depending upon the size of the group.
In order to prepare for the session you will need to have narrowed your choice of topic down to one or two.
- Something you are curious about
- Something you are enthusiastic about
- Something you are passionate about
- It doesn’t necessarily have to be a therapeutic medium or a condition
Reading the two papers for this assignment may give you new ideas for your topic.
Your essay is not expected to be a research project in its own right, but could be the basis of your topic for the Masters in Play Therapy dissertation, if you wish to proceed to this stage. Your essay must show your understanding of how you are able to apply an understanding of research methodology to your topic, after assessing the literature published on the subject, suggesting questions that should be the basis of further research and the research method(s) that you would recommend. To satisfy the latter point you must list the criteria that you use to make your choice of method and the pros and cons for the methods that you have considered.
Your essay should be based on your experience in delivering therapeutic play and play therapy sessions and clinical supervision. This must be linked this to informing theories drawn from psychology, neurobiology and other relevant disciplines.
In order to prepare adequately for your essay presentation you need to:
First, read ‘A Brief Introduction to Research & Research Methods’ by Dr John Bates. You may have covered some of these topics on previous courses but please read it to refresh your memory.
Secondly, read and absorb ‘Play Therapy Research – Diploma Level – Essay Content’ by Jeff Thomas. This introduces concepts and policies specifically for the field of play therapy drawing upon non-academic sources, with an emphasis on real life practice. Although some of this material was covered at the Certificate stage, much will be new to most students.
Finally, draft notes for your presentation upon the application of research to your topic. Include material from both papers. You are not required to use PowerPoint but can do if you wish.
Be prepared to answer questions that will elicit your grasp of developing a good research methodology and demonstrate how you will assess the literature that you have read relating to your topic.
Your essay will lose marks if research has not been adequately covered. You will gain marks if your coverage of research methods is thorough and relates to your topic
Introduction
This paper builds upon ‘A Brief Introduction to Research & Research Methods’ by Dr John Bates.’
Our objective is to introduce principles and methods that are drawn from non-academic sources that are relevant to the real life practice of play therapy. These complement and in some cases overlap those covered by John. It’s very important that you read ALL of this paper, perhaps several times, to digest and absorb the concepts so that you can refer to many of them in your essay. The abbreviation PTUK covers both Play Therapy UK and Play Therapy International research activities.
We are covering:
- A systemic view of play therapy practice – this might provide ideas for your topic
- Research methodology – many students get it wrong and lose marks
- Levels of play therapy research – use PTUK’s three frameworks to identify the level of the research featured in your essay
- Questions – stressing the importance of getting them right
- Population – designing the right sampling frame
- Critiquing published research – a review of the relevant literature should be a an important part of your essay
- PTUK research guidelines to help you understand our approach to research
- Pragmatic psychology – an important component of PTUK’s research strategy – why we want to integrate research with practice
- Single-case research methods – one of the most applicable method for play therapy practitioners
