Recovery Principles in Research Practice

In the field of mental health, ‘evidence-based practice’ is upheld as the benchmark of quality care, lead by positivist traditions. However, the evolution to a ‘recovery model’ has expanded notions of ‘treatment’ to incorporate processes of meaning and identity outside the illness role (Davidson, 2007). Such changes in clinical approaches require similar expansion within research practice to foster appropriate types of ‘evidence’ in ways that align with recovery principles (Fossey, Harvey, McDermott, & Davidson, 2002).

Results from a Critical Interpretive Synthesis demonstrate the incongruence between approaches of recovery principles and dominant research paradigms in youth mental health in Australia. The need for expansion in research approaches can be argued. Findings from the second stage of research present a Grounded Theory of musical identity in mental illness. This theory details how young people’s experience of ‘Musical Symptoms’ are expressions of pathology and how appropriate services and community-based music opportunities are necessary for recovery.

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