|
[Print-friendly version]
Defining the Nature and Outcomes of Australian Professional Supervision: Applying Holloway's Systems Approach
Karla Johnston 
By applying Holloway's (1995) Systems Approach to Supervision (SAS) across professional groups. Many Australian professionals, such as psychologists, counsellors, accountants and the like, are required to participate in some form of supervision before being granted permission to practice within their respective fields independently. This is the first study of its kind to investigate the supervision experience of a range of professional groups within Australia.
Transcript
Interviewer: I would like to welcome Karla Johnston who is going to discuss with us about her research today. Welcome Karla.
Karla Johnston: Thank you Nicolette.
Interviewer: Karla can you share with us what your research title is and provide us with a brief explanation of the research project.
Karla Johnston: The title of my project is defining the nature and outcomes of Australian Professional supervision, applying Holloway’s systems approach to supervision. The research project has looked at the experience of professionals who have to undertake supervision for a certain period of time in order for them to become registered with their professional body. For example, one of the groups in this sample were psychologists who are actually required to undertake a 2 year period of supervision before they’re registered as fully qualified psychologists.
Interviewer: Karla can you tell us how you identified that there was a gap in the research which led you to your project?
Karla Johnston: Yes. Sure. I actually underwent supervision myself and was particularly interested. I had a number of supervisors. I was particularly interested in how they had been taught to supervise and once I realised there was no course, or there’s no training at that time to teach people to supervise, I started reading about this field. It became obvious to me that, even though there were some theories, particularly in the field of psychology, about how supervision occurs and what should take place, there was no research that actually was underpinned by theory. I was actually just cleaning out a filing cabinet of my boss one day and I came across Holloway’s systems approach to supervision, which I thought was very comprehensive, yet easy to understand theory. That’s why I decided to use that theory to explore my research.
Interviewer: Karla, can you just briefly outline the project and the major findings from this project?
Karla Johnston:Yes, sure. The project was based on House and McKenzie’s model of scientific inquiry. I guess what that means is that I’ve got 4 studies. The first study and the second study were exploratory studies and I collected cross sectional data. Study 3 was more of a quasi-experimental design and it was cross sectional as well as longitudinal and the 4th study was a confirmatory study, which meant that the results in this case were generalisable not just to those people that had graduated in the sciences or health sciences but also those in the business area. So in terms of study 1. As I said study 1 was exploratory and there I was trying to ascertain a definition of professional supervision across different professional types. So for example, people studying or business consultants, as well as psychologists, occupational therapists, nurses, counsellors and the like. And from that study I was able to ascertain a definition of supervision that was, where supervisors identify effective supervision as well as satisfying supervision. And that had never been done before. It actually happened, that definition related very closely to Holloway’s systems approach to supervision definition. Study 2. That was to investigate how Holloway’s task function matrix, which is a particular aspect of her model, could be used to teach and train supervisees and supervisors in the process of supervision. Also there are looking at other factors, such as delivery modes. For example, whether face to face or telephone or email was the best mode of supervision. The finding there was that, people, all groups of professionals prefer face to face supervision, and that they also prefer to choose their own supervisor rather than their having one allocated to them.
Interviewer: Can you tell me what implications this has had on education?
Karla Johnston:In terms, I guess, the implications have been for the 4 studies. It’s quite complex. The major contribution or implication is, that we’ve now got a tool or a questionnaire that has been validated and developed to measure supervision experiences and satisfaction and effectiveness. It’s also been the first time that I’ve been able to use a multi method approach to understanding this experience through qualitative and quantitative data and not just descriptive, but also inferential statistics to describe the effects. Also, Holloway’s model is actually a tool that can be used to teach supervision. It’s also can be used to train supervisors in supervision and, I guess, most importantly, it’s an evaluation tool. It’s actually a model that can be used to evaluate the performance of a supervisee. Also by, this is what happened in study 4 and 3, where I looked at how could workplace managers as well as supervisors, evaluate supervisees and that tool was able to do that.
Interviewer: That’s really fantastic. Thank you so much for that. I really appreciate it.
|
