Critical Consciousness Development in a Group Intervention Context: Examining Clinician and Participant Verbalizations

摘要

Critical consciousness (CC) is a process of reflecting critically on how power is distributed and used in one's life contexts, including situations of abuse and oppression, and acquiring the skills and motivation to act to change these situations. Groups designed to foster CC have incorporated theoretically proposed components and group processes and results are promising. No empirical data to identify and validate these group processes, however, have been collected. The study purpose was to empirically identify facilitator and participant verbalizations, in a real-world group context, that evidenced engagement in theorized CC components. We transcribed 26 hr of audio-recorded group session interactions between facilitators and participants to identify exemplar verbalizations of theoretically derived CC components. We used a directed content qualitative analytic approach and hypothesis coding to analyze all transcripts. Participants included 16 female partner-violence survivors participating in a group career development intervention and 7 female group facilitators. Findings yielded exemplar facilitator and participant verbalizations for each CC component: group identification, dialogue, problem posing, identifying contradictions, power analysis, critical self-reflection, and liberation behavior. There are clear verbal interactions that group facilitators can use to promote CC; however, we also found theoretical variations regarding how facilitators and survivors engaged in each CC component. Findings show a need to learn more about the timing of CC component development, its measurement, and the influence of group composition on CC development.