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"THERE IS A TIME FOR EACH AND EVERY THING"
its own methodologies of original supervision/coaching research. With this
observation Knopf opens a view on the next headline:
RELATION BETWEEN RESEARCH AND PRACTICE
Under this heading the reader may find three articles related to the topic of the
relations between research and practice.
In an empirical study Heidi Möller, Katrin Oellerich, Denise Hinn and
Silja Kotte from University of Kassel, Germany, offer the reader an insight
into Research on Consulting - With, For, or Against Practice? Examining
the recent literature, they are filtering out which consulting research projects
and consulting practices are acting in concert, and are considered beneficial
by coaching practitioners. In contrast to that, they focus on the gap between
expert knowledge and scientific knowledge; a gap that simply cannot be closed.
The distance between them between them is insurmountable. They dig deeper
into this topic by describing vividly the futile efforts spent in differentiating
consulting formats, thus clearing their own position towards the research
issue: “...this means letting go of an ostensible safety net in this most complex
of endeavours”. Following this, they examine the current state of consulting
research and introduce the first findings from a comprehensive empirical
survey in which coaching practitioners were asked about their motivation for
— or against — taking part in a coaching research project. They encountered a
contradiction: coaches seem to be keen on “hard facts” produced by research,
but are unwilling to take part in research themselves.
In the next article Latvian Supervisors’ Values Kristine Martinsone and
colleagues from Riga Stradin$ University present the results of a pilot study of
supervision in different professional groups in Latvia. They state that in their
country supervision as a new profession is developing, and they find it important
to characterize how its professional basis is created. This study focuses on the
content of the value system of supervision by first characterizing the values of
the practicing supervisors, and subsequently confronting the question if there
are any differences between supervisors practicing in different professional
fields. Thirdly, they explore the differences between evaluations of importance
and attainability of personal values. After a review of the research methods, the
reader gets an interesting and detailed explanation of the results. Martinsone
c.s. found significant differences between supervisors practicing in different
professional fields, with regards both to the value systems and the evaluations
of importance and attainability of personal values.