Open research questions in Counseling, Therapy, and Family Dynamics

What the literature leaves open

• The gap in existing research is the limited understanding of the drivers of immobility. The paper highlights the need to understand why people stay despite dissatisfaction with the societal status quo.

  What comes after voicing: understanding the drivers of immobility and strategies for coping with a dissatisfying status quo · 2026 · DOI

• The lack of a narrative framework for understanding moral injury. The need for a clinically useful heuristic for addressing moral injury. The gap in prior work is the lack of a framework that integrates moral injury research, tragic narrative form, and therapeutic meaning-making.

  Moral Injury as Tragedy: The Tragic Arc as a Narrative Heuristic for Clinical Practice · 2026 · DOI

• The paper identifies the challenge of investigating clients' responding activities to wh-questions for solution generation. The study highlights the complexity of analyzing sequential data and the need for a detailed understanding of the interactional context. The paper notes the challenge of distinguishing between different types of responses, such as 'answering' and 'extended answering'.

  The cooperative coaching client: Clients’ responding activities to wh-questions for solution generation in coaching · 2026 · DOI

• The paper identifies a gap in the analysis of educational tools and their role in reproducing the dominant discourse. The gap is in the lack of critical reflection on the quotidian aspects of educational technologies. The paper suggests that the tools deployed in education are unable to bring about substantial critique and change.

  Retooling the tools of critical reflection: on how quotidian tasks undermine critical inquiry · 2026 · DOI

• The paper identifies a gap in understanding the empathetic work involved in childcare. The gap is due to the lack of exploration of the challenges of empathizing with young children. The gap is also due to the lack of understanding of the potential consequences of this empathetic work for the caregiver's emotional functioning.

  Minding the Children: Carework, Empathy, and the Phinneas Gage Effect · 2025 · DOI

• The challenges include the need for a cultural shift in mental healthcare services. The study faced challenges due to the COVID-19 lockdown, requiring online data collection and opportunistic sampling.

  Becoming an Open Dialogue practitioner: a qualitative study of practitioners’ training experiences and transitioning to practice · 2024 · DOI

• The study was based on a partial analysis of data from a qualitative process evaluation - The study had a limited number of OD practitioners - Place of work, sex and age were not included on the table to reduce the risk of identification - Data collection could only be completed online due to the national COVID-19 lockdown

  Becoming an Open Dialogue practitioner: a qualitative study of practitioners’ training experiences and transitioning to practice · 2024 · DOI

• While solution generation and question-answer sequences are key to change in coaching, little is known about the role of questions with a solution-oriented agenda.

  The cooperative coaching client: Clients’ responding activities to wh-questions for solution generation in coaching · 2026 · DOI

• OBJECTIVE: Despite decades of policy emphasizing the role of evidence in guiding services, few studies have sought to improve the degree to which evidence is used in supervision and treatment.

  Cultivating evidence-based clinical reasoning and action in youth mental health care: The Reaching Families multisite randomized trial. · 2025 · DOI

• An overview of pedagogical strategies to promote relational competence in mental health education of healthcare professionals is lacking and more knowledge is needed in this field.

  What is known about the development of relational competence in the mental health education of healthcare professionals – a scoping review · 2025 · DOI

• - Thirdly, there are implications for helpers from diverse disciplines, especially in multi-disciplinary teams, where the question of engagement is disregarded or not understood when intervention is being considered.

  Engagement: Who's Engaging Whom? · 1987 · DOI

• By collecting insufficient information about implicitly assumes that the problem, the problem is restricted to one or more subsystems in the family.

  Theory and Practice of Structural Family Therapy: Illustration and Critique · 1986 · DOI

• Future research can explore the use of sociodrama in other contexts, such as education and community development. Further studies can investigate the effectiveness of sociodrama in promoting positive outcomes for family members.

  The Alcoholic Family Sociodrama Explores Social Atom Roles · 2026 · DOI

• There is a need for effective tools to help family members understand and address issues related to alcoholism and addiction. Sociodrama can fill this gap by providing a unique and interactive approach to exploring family dynamics.

  The Alcoholic Family Sociodrama Explores Social Atom Roles · 2026 · DOI

• The study identifies a gap in the understanding of the experiences of mental health professionals working with sexually abused children. The study highlights the need for institutional support and policy reforms.

  Echoes of Support: Stories of Mental Health Professionals in Facilitating Healing of Sexually Abused Children · 2026 · DOI

• The Montessori approach has been largely ignored in the context of supporting trauma-affected children. There is a need to examine the alignment of the Montessori approach with the 3R phase.

  “Does the Montessori Approach To Healing Trauma-Affected Children Align with the “Regulate, Relate, and Reason” Phase of the NME? A Thematic Analysis · 2026 · DOI

• The poem identifies the need to explore the lived experiences of individuals navigating identity, trauma, and the search for a better home. The poem highlights the importance of finding the right interpretations and manifestations to the healing journey that is life.

  You Are My Home · 2026 · DOI

• The need for a narrative work process useful to qualitative researchers and practitioners. The importance of autoethnography in understanding professional experiences.

  Autoethnography. Personal and Professional Transitions in Socio-Cultural Context · 2026 · DOI

• The study involved a small sample size of self-selecting students. The extent to which the students were representative of students more generally is a matter of conjecture. The limited population size of the participant group means that the findings and claims are somewhat tentative.

  Writing for well-being; The therapeutic power of the compositional process · 2026 · DOI

• Further research could explore whether the approach to writing adopted in this study might have equally efficacious effects on the mental health and emotional well-being of adolescent and pre-adolescent students. Research could investigate the impact of expressive writing on students' mental health and emotional well-being in different educational settings.

  Writing for well-being; The therapeutic power of the compositional process · 2026 · DOI

• The study highlights the challenges faced by school counselors who have experienced shared earthquake trauma with their clients. The research emphasizes the need for professional support systems for counselors working within collective trauma contexts. The study reveals the emotional dynamics occurring within counseling sessions.

  School Counselors’ Challenges with Shared Earthquake Trauma During the Counseling Process: The Wounded Healer · 2026 · DOI

• One of the strengths of qualitative research is its capacity to deeply explore unique and underexamined phenomena (Creswell & Poth, 2016). The professional challenges faced by those providing psychological services in the context of large-scale, collective traumas such as earthquakes remain a relatively unexplored area in the counseling literature (Kim & Han, 2021). The findings of this study may inform the development of more comprehensive policies and interventions aimed at addressing the challenges encountered by counselors working under the influence of shared trauma. This study offers a detailed understanding of the difficulties wounded healer school counselors face while supporting clients with whom they share traumatic experiences. When shared traumas are recent or unresolved, wounded healers are at increased risk for emotional exhaustion and burnout (Geoffrion et al., 2016). In this context, psychological resilience emerges as a crucial factor in mitigating the impact of trauma and maintaining counselors’ emotional and professional well-being (Skovholt & Trotter-Mathison, 2011). Enhancing psychological resilience is particularly vital for counselors operating in high-stakes environments affected by widespread trauma. Accordingly, better-structured and sustained opportunities for trauma-informed training, supervision, and personal therapy are needed. Although some trauma-related training and peer support from outside the affected regions were available, our findings indicate that these resources were typically short-term and insufficient in scope. Furthermore, our findings suggest that counselors working in disaster-affected areas often believe that external professionals cannot fully understand or address the needs of traumatized clients. This belief underscores the importance of empowering wounded healer counselors already embedded in these communities. These counselors are often more familiar with the students, families, and systemic dynamics, and they are uniquely positioned to provide culturally and emotionally relevant care (Conchar & Repper, 2014). Thus, prioritizing sustained support for locally based mental health professionals with shared trauma experiences may lead to better outcomes for clients. A critical finding of this study was the recognition among participants that shared trauma frequently led to shifts from empathy to sympathy and increased levels of self-disclosure. While most School Mental Health (2026) 18:270–2841 3 counselors perceived their self-disclosure as more beneficial than harmful, they also acknowledged the potential risks. For this reason, it is essential to clarify the dual nature of shared trauma; its potential to foster connection and empathy, as well as its risks to therapeutic boundaries and counselor well-being.

  School Counselors’ Challenges with Shared Earthquake Trauma During the Counseling Process: The Wounded Healer · 2026 · DOI

• Traditional notions of refusal are rooted in ableism and normative school logics. There is a need to reframe refusal as a mode of access-otherwise. The paper identifies a gap in the literature on the role of the teacher in reframing refusal.

  Refusals as Access-Otherwise · 2026 · DOI

• Future research should explore the long-term effects of laboratori di lettura ad alta voce on the elaboration of lived experience, identity construction, and social inclusion.

  Leggere ad alta voce, per “sentirsi oltre le sbarre” · 2026 · DOI

• There is a lack of understanding of the pedagogical value of narrative and shared reading aloud in the context of criminal justice processes involving incarcerated mothers with their children.

  Leggere ad alta voce, per “sentirsi oltre le sbarre” · 2026 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Counseling, Therapy, and Family Dynamics

• Beyond the divide between cognition and discourse: Using interpretative phenomenological analysis in health psychology · Psychology and Health · 1996 · 1,531 citations
• The Analytic Challenge in Interpretive Description · International Journal of Qualitative Methods · 2004 · 1,264 citations
• Beyond Doer and Done To: an Intersubjective View of Thirdness · The Psychoanalytic Quarterly · 2004 · 903 citations
• Human Systems as Linguistic Systems: Preliminary and Evolving Ideas about the Implications for Clinical Theory · Family Process · 1988 · 878 citations
• The Development of Constructivist Grounded Theory · International Journal of Qualitative Methods · 2006 · 864 citations
• The Reflecting Team: Dialogue and Meta‐Dialogue in Clinical Work · Family Process · 1987 · 695 citations
• Fifty years of the critical incident technique: 1954-2004 and beyond · Qualitative Research · 2005 · 692 citations
• Hypothesizing — Circularity — Neutrality: Three Guidelines for the Conductor of the Session · Family Process · 1980 · 600 citations
• Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography · Journal of Contemporary Ethnography · 2006 · 482 citations
• Brief Therapy: Focused Solution Development · Family Process · 1986 · 479 citations

Most recent work

• Interventive Interviewing Revisited: An Updated Framework · Family Process · 2026
• The Pilfered material base of community: Toward a general theory of homers · History and Anthropology · 2026
• Art psychotherapy with youth in homelessness hostels · International Journal of Art Therapy · 2026
• Specters of Trauma and Healing: Navigating Memories and Spaces in Childhood Abuse Survivors Through an Ethnographic and Philosophical Lens · Anthropology of Consciousness · 2026
• Connecting care: Understanding the relational dimensions of supporting migrant children and young people living with sickle cell disease · Social Science & Medicine · 2026
• ‘Now we are on the same page’ - experiences of foster parents and social workers participating in Trauma-Informed Care (TIC) training · Child Abuse & Neglect · 2026
• Lost childhood: lived experiences of growing up with a parent with addiction · Children and Youth Services Review · 2026
• Worden’s tasks and mediators of mourning · Death Studies · 2026
• Exploring Research Ethics Through Clients’ and Therapists’ Experiences in a Multiperspective Study on Couple Therapy and Violence · Contemporary Family Therapy · 2026
• Navigating Race, Trauma, and Tradition: A Relational-Cultural Case Study with a Biracial Tradwife · Psychology of Women Quarterly · 2026

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