Citation

Karpetis G. Trauma Violence Abuse 2019; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Affiliation

Adelaide Medical School, University of Adelaide, South Australia, Australia.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/1524838019875698

PMID

31522625

Abstract

Aiming to identify the mechanisms generating positive clinical supervision outcomes in child protection, this narrative review provides an in-depth analysis of the theories underpinning clinical supervision in the latest child protection literature. The conceptual analysis of 28 peer-reviewed journal articles highlighted the presence of the psychodynamic, managerialist, critical, behavioral, systemic, humanistic, and eclectic theoretical perspectives. Implicit theoretical eclecticism permeated most of the publications examined. This eclecticism resulted in confusing child protection practices as different theories require different practice techniques and result in different practice outcomes. The study found that half of the publications exclusively adopted the critical and managerialist theoretical perspectives that undervalue the impact of internal factors in the behaviors of families and practitioners. Despite the fact that all the publications acknowledged the centrality of emotions in supervision, only the psychodynamic theoretical perspective elaborated on the precise process through which emotions are conceptualized in clinical supervision. Because most of the publications neither identified the operationalization process nor evaluated any clinical supervision outcomes, questions arise about the theoretical robustness and essentially the effectiveness of child protection practice itself. Therefore, a need emerges for case studies to explore the process through which theory-bound clinical supervision practices generate effective child protection outcomes.

Language: en

Keywords

child protection; clinical supervision; literature review; reflective; theory