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Mental Health Problems through a Critical Realist Discourse Analysis Lens
Seminar details
Title: Making Sense of Service Users' Accounts of their Mental Health Problems through a Critical Realist Discourse Analysis lens
Date: Monday 12th June 2023
Time: 15:00-16:00 (UK time)
Abstract
Making sense of accounts of mental health problems requires a method able to deal with complexity. Yet the different underlying epistemological and ontological positions of the methods researchers use, based, for example, on biomedicine or social constructionism, produce highly partial analyses. Addressing this problem, Critical Realist Discourse Analysis (CRDA) is an applied interdisciplinary method employing synthesized discourse analysis underpinned by critical realism, to examine discursive, material, embodied, and institutional factors that might inform how service users make sense of their mental health problems and associated service use. This talk will outline the epistemological/ontological underpinnings of CRDA and its three-phase methodology, before showcasing the method using, as examples, two data sets from care leavers and mothers. Applying CRDA, this talk will demonstrate a method for analysing the complexity of interacting factors informing service users’ understanding of their mental health problems.
Speaker biography
Dr Wendy Sims-Schouten is Deputy Director of Arts & Sciences and Associate Professor at University College London. She is a Chartered Member of the British Psychological Society, and Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Wendy has a specific interest in interdisciplinary research with a focus on historic and contemporary practices around mental health, wellbeing and safeguarding of marginalised/disadvantaged groups, including child refugees/migrants, young care leavers, homeless people and children/young people from ethnic minority communities, in national and international contexts (England, Scotland, Netherlands, Egypt, Canada, Indonesia); she has also researched issues around mental health literacy in HE. Her work centralises voices and coproduction and has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, Research England, NIHR, as well as charities and Portsmouth City Council.
Seminar recording
Watch the recording of this seminar below: