Qualitative Research in Practice : Stories From the Field - Blogs Unpad

Qualitative research in practice
and we understand that there is interest in them in the
United Kingdom as well.
As researchers, we really want to make a contribution
to family change—we can’t do that directly but
we can do it by providing good information to practitioners,
managers and policy-makers. From the outset
we wanted to produce research that made sense to
these people and that they could use, and this has
driven our work and continues to drive it. We have
always been aware that it is not enough just to do the
research and hope that people will find it, so we are
very active in circulating our materials and trying hard
to make them accessible in as wide a range of settings
as we possibly can. We have found people incredibly
receptive to our work and that is really pleasing. We
try to establish and maintain a dialogue with a wide
range of users of our work to keep on hearing what it
is they need in terms of information and how they
need it delivered to them and then to incorporate that
into the work we do.
Dorothy Scott—Identification of post-partum depression
Dorothy:
In Chapter 1 I described how my research in the
early 1980s with Victorian maternal and child health
nurses grew out of my clinical work with women
with post-partum psychiatric disorders. My initial
goal of increasing the capacity of the maternal and
child health service to identify and refer women to
psychiatric services was broadened to explore the
conditions under which the nurses might encompass
maternal emotional and social well-being in their
role. I would never have guessed that fifteen years
later I would find myself on the steps of the Victorian
Parliament with a megaphone in my hand, addressing
a large crowd, mostly women pushing prams, demonstrating
against government moves to restrict access to
the maternal and child health service! In all of the
intervening fifteen years, it never felt like I was taking
the research down a predetermined pathway—rather
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