Children's services' drive towards accountability, and children's rights advocates' desire to truthfully represent children's views, are leading to more evaluation of child therapy services. The challenge is to find methods that accurately reflect children's views of their therapy. In this article we argue that play therapy skills have an important place in evaluating child therapy practice. We discuss four different directive play therapy techniques three of which have been piloted in the first author's practice to help children express their views of therapy at the end of their interventions. These are: 'The expert show', the miniature playroom technique and puppet and large doll evaluations. Explanations and examples are given from pilot research with 12 children. The issues and challenges inherent in play-based evaluations also are explored. We argue that expressive therapists are in a prime position to evaluate children's services and that children appear well able to express their views of therapy with these child-centred techniques.
This article reports on a follow-up study exploring the use of play-based evaluation methods to facilitate children's views of therapy. The development and piloting of these techniques, with 12 children in the author's own practice, was previously reported in this journal. It was argued that play-based evaluation methods reduce the power imbalance inherent in adult researcher/interviewer-child relationships and provide children with meaningful ways to share their views. In this article, follow-up research into play-based evaluations with 20 children and 7 different play therapists is drawn upon to explore in greater depth the strengths and weaknesses of these techniques. The study shows that play-based evaluation techniques are important and flexible methods for facilitating children's views of child therapy. It is argued that those play therapists who incorporate their therapeutic skills effectively, maintain flexibility and sensitively attune to the child during the evaluation session, enable the child to explore their views most fully.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.