The psychological battle for control: A qualitative study of health-care professionals' understandings of the treatment of anorexia nervosa

This paper reports a qualitative, idiographic study, which intensively examines a multidisciplinary team of clinicians' subjective understandings and experiences of treating young people with anorexia nervosa. The study employs semi-structured interviews and interpretative phenomenological analysis, these methods enabling individual clinicians' perspectives to be explored in depth and retained within the analysis. The analysis focuses on the salient higher-order theme of control which emerges as central to understanding the treatment of the anorexic child. Three control-related themes are used to illustrate the multiplicity of meanings and experiences which are relevant to this team of health-care professionals. It is suggested that this paper makes three important contributions to the current eating disorder literature: illuminating the multi-faceted nature of the construct control; highlighting the importance of therapists' subjective understandings and experiences; and illustrating the value of qualitative methods for clinically relevant research. (C) 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.